Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

On the other hand, it's hard to argue that cigarettes aren't actually dangerous, since they kill around 500,000 Americans per year.

My point was that the consequences of the transgressions of plagiarism and shilling are relative to whether you're a non-journalist or a journalist, and less so about the actual worldly-impact of such transgressions.

IOW, both you and tptacek are right...but it depends on from what perspective you're looking at this from. Lehrer will likely never get a writing gig as prestigious as the New Yorker, even though what he allegedly did pretty much hurts no one (but the trivial truth).

Another example: in the military, lying about a medal is hugely dishonorable -- the U.S. Navy's supreme commander committed suicide when Newsweek questioned two "valor" pins. But you could be a commander whose decisions resulted in needless destruction/deaths and still get an honorable discharge. The latter case had more actual real-life impact, but the former case resulted in more "punishment" within the group.

The real issue here is that people don’t understand how profound the problem of conflicts of interest really is, and how easy it is to buy people. Doctors on Pfizer’s payroll may think they’re not being influenced by the drug maker — “I can still be objective!” they’ll say — but in reality, it’s very hard for us not to be swayed by money. Even minor amounts of it. Or gifts. Studies have found that doctors who receive free lunches or samples from pharmaceutical reps end up prescribing more of the company’s drugs afterwards. It’s just a fact of human life: we are compelled to reciprocate favors, and an ingrained inability to disregard what’s in our financial interest. As author Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” http://danariely.com/2012/07/09/disclosure-not-good-enough/

As I understand it, the experimental evidence is clear that measures like self-regulation, intuitive judgement, and disclosure are nowhere near sufficient to prevent the corrupting effects of conflicts of interest. What we need are new, simple rules grounded in the empirical findings. We're a long way from that, and it seems that such rules are likely to seem pretty extreme by today's standards, but as long as the science continues to pile up this way it seems like we will eventually have a shot at cleaning things up.