A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
Recently I was made aware by colleagues of a publication by authors of a new agent-based modeling toolkit in a different, hipper programming language. They compared their system to others, including mine, and made kind of a big checklist of who's better in what, and no surprise, theirs came out on top. But digging deeper, it quickly became clear that they didn't understand how to run my software correctly; and in many other places they bent over backwards to cherry-pick, and made a lot of bold and completely wrong claims. Correcting the record would place their software far below mine.
Mind you, I'm VERY happy to see newer toolkits which are better than mine -- I wrote this thing over 20 years ago after all, and have since moved on. But several colleagues demanded I do so. After a lot of back-and-forth however, it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed and didn't want to require a retraction or revision. And the authors kept coming up with excuses for their errors. So the journal quietly dropped the complaint.
I'm afraid that this is very common.
I recommended that the journal not publish the paper, and gave them a good list of improvements to give to the authors that should be made before re-submitting. The journal agreed with me, and rejected the paper.
A couple of months later, I saw it had been published unchanged in a different journal. It wasn't even a lower-quality journal, if I recall the impact factor was actually higher than the original one.
I despair of the scientific process.
This is one of the reasons you should never accept a single publication at face value. But this isn’t a bug — it’s part of the algorithm. It’s just that most muggles don’t know how science actually works. Once you read enough papers in an area, you have a good sense of what’s in the norm of the distribution of knowledge, and if some flashy new result comes over the transom, you might be curious, but you’re not going to accept it without a lot more evidence.
This situation is different, because it’s a case where an extremely popular bit of accepted wisdom is both wrong, and the system itself appears to be unwilling to acknowledge the error.
Schools should be using these kinds of examples in order to teach critical thinking. Unfortunately the other side of the lesson is how easy it is to push an agenda when you've got a little bit of private backing.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland when you were a graduate student there in the mid nineties. A lot of what you had to say shaped the way I think about computer science. Thank you.
Universities care about money and reputation. Individuals at universities care about their careers.
With exceptions of some saintly individual faculty members, a university is like a big for-profit corporation, only with less accountability.
Faculty bring in money, are strongly linked to reputation (scandal news articles may even say the university name in headlines rather than the person's name), and faculty are hard to get rid of.
Students are completely disposable, there will always be undamaged replacements standing by, and turnover means that soon hardly anyone at the university will even have heard of the student or internal scandal.
Unless you're really lucky, the university's position will be to suppress the messenger.
But if you go in with a lawyer, the lawyer may help your whistleblowing to be taken more seriously, and may also help you negotiate a deal to save your career. (For example of help, you need the university's/department's help in switching advisors gracefully, with funding, even as the uni/dept is trying to minimize the number of people who know about the scandal.)
Integrity is hard, but reputations are lifelong.
Back in my day, grad students generally couldn't afford lawyers.
Our conclusion was to never trust psychology majors with computer code. And like with any other expertise field they should have shown their idea and/or code to some CS majors at the very least before publishing.
How sad. Admitting and correcting a mistake may feel difficult, but it makes you credible.
As a reader, I would have much greater trust in a journal that solicited criticism and readily published corrections and retractions when warranted.
Personally, I would agree with you. That's how these things are supposed to work. In practice, people are still people.
Now I'm not saying that everything in M-S is junk, but the small subset I was exposed to was.
From the perspective of the academic community, there will be lower incentive to publish incorrect results if data and code is shared.
They make a lot of claims on how much faster they are than MASON, Netlogo, and Mesa. But in practice I am not finding that to be the case. Also they arent counting the Julia compilation step which takes an absurdly long time, and by the time that gets done similar simulations are already done, then they start the clock on their own benchmark.
Agents.jl and Mesa have the selling point of having better languages / libraries for numerical computation. But thats really a subset of msor ABM I think.
theyre usually published with a response by the authors
On my side-project todo list, I have an idea for a scientific service that overlays a "trust" network over the citation graph. Papers that uncritically cite other work that contains well-known issues should get tagged as "potentially tainted". Authors and institutions that accumulate too many of such sketchy works should be labeled equally. Over time this would provide an additional useful signal vs. just raw citation numbers. You could also look for citation rings and tag them. I think that could be quite useful but requires a bit of work.
The idea failed a simple sanity check: just going to Google Scholar, doing a generic search and reading randomly selected papers from within the past 15 years or so. It turned out most of them were bogus in some obvious way. A lot of ideas for science reform take as axiomatic that the bad stuff is rare and just needs to be filtered out. Once you engage with some field's literatures in a systematic way, it becomes clear that it's more like searching for diamonds in the rough than filtering out occasional corruption.
But at that point you wonder, why bother? There is no alchemical algorithm that can convert intellectual lead into gold. If a field is 90% bogus then it just shouldn't be engaged with at all.
1) Anyone publishes anything they want, whenever they want, as much or as little as the want. Publishing does not say anything about your quality as a researcher, since anyone can do it.
2) Being published doesn't mean it's right, or even credible. No one is filtering the stream, so there's no cachet to being published.
We then let memetic evolution run its course. This is the system that got us Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Mendeleev, Euler, etc. It works, but it's slow, sometimes ugly to watch, and hard to game so some people would much rather use the "Approved by A Council of Peers" nonsense we're presently mired in.
We are just back to the universities under the religious control system that we had before the Enlightenment. Any change would require separating academia from political government power.
Academia is just the propaganda machine for the government, just like the church was the tool for justifying god-gifted powers to kings.
Still I'm skeptical about any sort of system trying to figure out 'trust'. There's too much on the line for researchers/students/... to the point where anything will eventually be gamed. Just too many people trying to get into the system (and getting in is the most important part).
The system ends up promoting an even more conservative culture. What might start great will end up with groups and institutions being even more protective of 'their truths' to avoid getting tainted.
Don't think there's any system which can avoid these sort of things, people were talking about this before WW1, globalisation just put it in overdrive.
That's reference-stealing, some other paper I read cited this so it should be OK, I'll steal their reference. I always make sure I read the cited paper before citing it myself, it's scary how often it says something rather different to what the citation implies. That's not necessarily bad research, more that the author of the citing paper was looking for effect A in the cited reference and I'm looking for effect B, so their reason for citing differs from mine, and it's a valid reference in their paper but wouldn't be in mine.
When you added it up, most of the hard parts were Engineering, and a bit Econ. You would really struggle to work through tough questions in engineering, spend a lot of time on economic theory, and then read the management stuff like you were reading a newspaper.
Management you could spot a mile away as being soft. There's certainly some interesting ideas, but even as students we could smell it was lacking something. It's just a bit too much like a History Channel documentary. Entertaining, certainly, but it felt like false enlightenment.
And from the comments:
> From my experience in social science, including some experience in managment studies specifically, researchers regularly belief things – and will even give policy advice based on those beliefs – that have not even been seriously tested, or have straight up been refuted.
Sometimes people use fewer than one non replicatable studies. They invent studies and use that! An example is the "Harvard Goal Study" that is often trotted out at self-review time at companies. The supposed study suggests that people who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them than people who do not. However, Harvard itself cannot find such a study existing:
Straight-up replications are rare, but if a finding is real, other PIs will partially replicate and build upon it, typically as a smaller step in a related study. (E.g., a new finding about memory comes out, my field is emotion, I might do a new study looking at how emotion and your memory finding interact.)
If the effect is replicable, it will end up used in other studies (subject to randomness and the file drawer effect, anyway). But if an effect is rarely mentioned in the literature afterwards...run far, FAR away, and don't base your research off it.
A good advisor will be able to warn you off lost causes like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_Rare_in_Patients_Tre...
Ranking 1 to 3 - 1 being the best - 3 the bare minimum for publication.
3. Citations only
2. Citations + full disclosure of data.
1. Citations + full disclosure of data + replicated
you'll just get replication rings in addition to citation rings.
People who cheat in their papers will have no issues cheating in their replication studies too. All this does, is give them a new tool to attack papers they don't like by faking a failed replication.
One thing I would very much like to see is personal financial disclosures about grant awards, salaries, and funding sources of the main authors of a paper.
The main author received a $400,000 grant from the Save Our Turtles foundation and a $2 million dollar grant from the John "Turtle Lover" Heisenberg foundation when writing his peer-reviewed paper revealing that more public funding for turtle sanctuaries unlocks massive local economic benefits in the Upper Mississippi Delta.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/pdf/pmed.00...
For example, here's an article that argues (with data) that there is actually little publication bias in medical studies in the Cochrane database:
Ioannidis' work during Covid raised him in my esteem. It's rare to see someone in academics who is willing to set their own reputation on fire in search of truth.
“Most Published Research Findings Are False” —> “Most Published COVID-19 Research Findings Are False” -> “Uh oh, I did a wrongthink, let’s backtrack at bit”.
Is that it?
If IFR is low then a lot of the assumptions that justified lockdowns are invalidated (the models and assumptions were wrong anyway for other reasons, but IFR is just another). So Ioannidis was a bit of a class traitor in that regard and got hammered a lot.
The claim he's a conspiracy theorist isn't supported, it's just the usual ad hominem nonsense (not that there's anything wrong with pointing out genuine conspiracies against the public! That's usually called journalism!). Wikipedia gives four citations for this claim and none of them show him proposing a conspiracy, just arguing that when used properly data showed COVID was less serious than others were claiming. One of the citations is actually of an article written by Ioannidis himself. So Wikipedia is corrupt as per usual. Grokipedia's article is significantly less biased and more accurate.
Talked about it years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125867
Others said they’d never seen it. So maybe it’s rare. But no one will tell you even if they encounter. Guaranteed career blackball.
I've also seen the resistance that results from trying to investigate or even correct an issue in a key result of a paper. Even before it's published the barrier can be quite high (and I must admit that since it's not my primary focus and my name was not on it, I did not push as hard as I could have on it)
I read the submitted version and told her it wasn't OK. She withdrew the paper and I left her lab shortly after. I simply could not stand the tendency to juice up papers, and I didn't want to have my reputation tainted by a paper that was false (I'm OK with my reputation being tainted by a paper that was just not very good).
What really bothers me is when authors intentionally leave out details of their method. There was a hot paper (this was ~20 years ago) about a computational biology technique ("evolutionary trace") and when we did the journal club, we tried to reproduce their results- which started with writing an implementation from their description. About half way through, we realized that the paper left out several key steps, and we were able to infer roughly what they did, but as far as we could tell, it was an intentional omission made to keep the competition from catching up quickly.
When a junior researcher, e.g. a grad student, fails to replicate a study, they assume it's technique. If they can't get it after many tries, they just move on, and try some other research approach. If they claim it's because the original study is flawed, people will just assume they don't have the skills to replicate it.
One of the problems is that science doesn't have great collaborative infrastructure. The only way to learn that nobody can reproduce a finding is to go to conferences and have informal chats with people about the paper. Or maybe if you're lucky there's an email list for people in your field where they routinely troubleshoot each other's technique. But most of the time there's just not enough time to waste chasing these things down.
I can't speak to whether people get blackballed. There's a lot of strong personalities in science, but mostly people are direct and efficient. You can ask pretty pointed questions in a session and get pretty direct answers. But accusing someone of fraud is a serious accusation and you probably don't want to get a reputation for being an accuser, FWIW.
The replication crisis is largely particular to psychology, but I wonder about the scope of the don't rock the boat issue.
https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
I think perhaps blackball is guaranteed. No one likes a snitch. “We’re all just here to do work and get paid. He’s just doing what they make us do”. Scientist is just job. Most people are just “I put thing in tube. Make money by telling government about tube thing. No need to be religious about Science”.
In terms of solutions, the practice of 'preregistration' seems like a move in the right direction.
If this isn't bad people, then who can ever be called bad people? The word "bad" loses its meaning if you explain away every bad deed by such people as something else. Putting other people's lives at risk by deciding to drive when you are drunk sounds like very bad people to me.
> They’re living in a world in which doing the bad thing–covering up error, refusing to admit they don’t have the evidence to back up their conclusions–is easy, whereas doing the good thing is hard.
I don't understand this line of reasoning. So if people do bad things because they know they can get away with it, they aren't bad people? How does this make sense?
> As researchers they’ve been trained to never back down, to dodge all criticism.
Exactly the opposite is taught. These people are deciding not to back down and admit wrong doing out of their own accord. Not because of some "training".
“That’s a bad thing to do…”
Maybe should be: “That’s a stupid thing to do…”
Or: reckless, irresponsible, selfish, etc.
In other words, maybe it has nothing to do with morals and ethics. Bad is kind of a lame word with limited impact.
> because they know they can get away with it
the point is that the paved paths lead to bad behavior
well designed systems make it easy to do good
> Exactly the opposite is taught.
"trained" doesn't mean "taught". most things are learned but not taught
You guys are saying that drink driving does not make someone a bad person. Ok. Let's say I grant you that. Where do you draw the line for someone being a bad person?
I mean with this line of reasoning you can "explain way" every bad deed and then nobody is a bad person. So do you guys consider someone to be actually a bad person and what did they have to do to cross that line where you can't explain away their bad deed anymore and you really consider them to be bad?
I don't think that that line can be drawn exactly. There are many factors to consider and I'm not sure that even considering them will allow you to draw this line and not come to claims like '99% of people are bad' or '99% of people are not bad'.
'Bad' is not an innate property of a person. 'Bad' is a label that exists only in an observer's model of the world. A spherical person in vacuum cannot be 'bad', but if we add an observer of the person, then they may become bad.
To my mind, the decision of labeling a person to be bad or not labeling them is a decision reflecting how the labeling subject cares about the one on the receiving side. So, it goes like this: first you decide what to do with bad behavior of someone, and if you decide to go about it with punishment, then you call them 'bad', if you decide to help them somehow to stop their bad behavior, then you don't call them bad.
It works like this: when observing some bad behavior I decide what to do about it. If I decide to punish a person, I declare them to be bad. If I decide to help them stop their behavior, I declare them to be not bad, but 'confused' or circumstantially forced, or whatever. Y'see: you cannot change personal traits of others, so if you declare that the reason of bad behavior is a personal trait 'bad' then you cannot do anything about it. If you want to change things, you need to find a cause of bad behavior, that can be controlled.
Once something enters The Canon, it becomes “untouchable,” and no one wants to question it. Fairly classic human nature.
> "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -and therefore never scrutinize or question."
-Stephen Jay Gould
Made me think of the black spoon error being off by a factor of 10 and the author also said it didn't impact the main findings.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/13/how-a-simp...
ResearchGate says 3936 citations. I'm not sure what they are counting, probably all the pdf uploaded to ResearchGate
I'm not sure how they count 6000 citations, but I guess they are counting everything, including quotes by the vicepresident. Probably 6001 after my comment.
Quoted in the article:
>> 1. Journals should disclose comments, complaints, corrections, and retraction requests. Universities should report research integrity complaints and outcomes.
All comments, complaints, corrections, and retraction requests? Unmoderated? Einstein articles will be full of comments explaining why he is wrong, from racist to people that can spell Minkowski to save their lives. In /newest there is like one post per week from someone that discover a new physics theory with the help of ChatGPT. Sometimes it's the same guy, sometimes it's a new one.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1964011
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279944386_The_Impac...
The number appears to be from Google Scholar, which currently reports 6269 citations for the paper
Judging from PubPeer, which allows people to post all of the above anonymously and with minimal moderation, this is not an issue in practice.
It has 0 comments, for an article that forgot "not" in "the result is *** statistical significative".
Even if nobody would cheat and massage data, we would still have studies that do not replicate on new data. 95 % confidence means that one in twenty surveys finds an effect that is only noise. The reporting of failed hypothesis testing would really help to find these cases.
So pre-registration helps, and it would also help to establish the standard that everything needed to replicate must be published, if not in the article itself, then in an accompanying repository.
But in the brutal fight for promotion and resources, of course labs won’t share all their tricks and process knowledge. Same problem if there is an interest in using the results commercially. E.g. in EE often the method is described in general but crucial parts of the code or circuit design are held back.
These probably have bigger chance of being published as you are providing a "novel" result, instead of fighting the get-along culture (which is, honestly, present in the workplace as well). But ultimately, they are (research-wise! but not politically) harder to do because they possibly mean you have figured out an actual thing.
Not saying this is the "right" approach, but it might be a cheaper, more practical way to get a paper turned around.
Whether we can work this out in research in a proper way is linked to whether we can work this out everywhere else? How many times have you seen people tap each other on the back despite lousy performance and no results? It's just easier to switch private positions vs research positions, so you'll have more of them not afraid to highlight bad job, and well, there's this profit that needs to pay your salary too.
As I said, harder from a research perspective, but if you can show, for instance, that sustainable companies are less profitable with a better study, you have basically contradicted the original one.
The paper in question shows - credibly or not - that companies focusing on sustainability perform better in a variety of metrics, including generating revenue. In other words: Not only can you have companies that do less harm, but these ethically superior companies also make more money. You can have your cake and eat it too. It likely has given many people a way to align their moral compass with their need to gain status and perform well within our system.
Even if the paper is a completely fabrication, I'm convinced it has made the world a better a place. I can't help but wonder if Gelman and King paused to consider the possible repercussions of their actions, and of what kinds of motivations they might have had. The linked post briefly dips into ethics, benevolently proclaiming that the original authors of the paper are not necessarily bad people.
Which feels ironic, as it seems to me that Gelman and King are doing the wrong here.
That is not at all how science is supposed to work.
If a result can't be replicated, it is useless. Replicators should not be told to "tread lightly", they should be encouraged. And replication papers should be published, regardless of the result (assuming they are good quality).
No, we shouldn't. Research fraud is committed by people, who must be held accountable. In this specific case, if the issues had truly been accidental, the author's would have responded and revised their paper. They did not, ergo their false claims were likely deliberate.
That the school and the journal show no interest - equally bad, and deserving of public shaming.
Of course, this is also a consequence of "publish or perish."
But if you're going to quote the whole thing it seems easier to just say so rather than quoting it bit by bit interspersed with "King continues" and annotating each I with [King].
Institutions could do something, surely. Require one-in-n papers be a replication. Only give prizes to replicated studies. Award prize monies split between the first two or three independent groups demonstrating a result.
The 6k citations though ... I suspect most of those instances would just assert the result if a citation wasn't available.
If the flow of tax, student debt and philanthropic money were cut off, the journals would all be wiped out because there's no organic demand for what they're doing.
They are pushed to publish a lot, which means journals have to review a lot of stuff (and they cannot replicate findings on their own). Once a paper is published on a decent journal, other researchers may not "waste time" replicating all findings, because they also want to publish a lot. The result is papers getting popular even if no one has actually bothered to replicate the results, especially if those papers are quoted by a lot of people and/or are written by otherwise reputable people or universities.
I often say that "hard sciences" have often progressed much more than social/human sciences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
With the above, I think we've empirically proven that we can't trust mathmeticians more than any other humans We should still rigorously verify their work with diverse, logical, and empirical methods. Also, build ground up on solid ideas that are highly vetted. (Which linear algebra actually does.)
The other approach people are taking are foundational, machine-checked, proof assistants. These use a vetted logic whose assistant produces a series of steps that can be checked by a tiny, highly-verified checker. They'll also oftne use a reliable formalism to check other formalisms. The people doing this have been making everything from proof checkers to compilers to assembly languages to code extraction in those tools so they are highly trustworthy.
But, we still need people to look at the specs of all that to see if there are spec errors. There's fewer people who can vet the specs than can check the original English and code combos. So, are they more trustworthy? (Who knows except when tested empirically on many programs or proofs, like CompCert was.)
This had been assigned many times previously. When my friend disproved the lemma, he asked the professor what he had done wrong. Turns out the lemma was in fact false, despite dozens of grad students having turned in "proofs" of the lemma already. The paper itself still stood, as a weaker form of the lemma was sufficient for its findings, but still very interesting.
Yet, I believe there hasn't been much progress as compared with STEM. But it is just a belief at the end of the day. There might be some study about this out there.
All the talks they were invited to give, all the followers they had, all the courses they sold and impact factor they have built. They are not going to came forward and say "I misinterpreted the data and made long reaching conclusions that are nonsense, sorry for misleading you and thousands of others".
The process protects them as well. Someone can publish another paper, make different conclusions. There is 0 effort get to the truth, to tell people what is and what isn't current consensus and what is reasonable to believe. Even if it's clear for anyone who digs a bit deeper it will not be communicated to the audience the academia is supposed to serve. The consensus will just quietly shift while the heavily quoted paper is still there. The talks are still out there, the false information is still propagated while the author enjoys all the benefits and suffers non of the negative consequences.
If it functions like that I don't think it's fair that tax payer funds it. It's there to serve the population not to exist in its own world and play its own politics and power games.
Benefits we can get from collective works, including scientific endeavors, are indefinitely large, as in far more important than what can be held in the head of any individual.
Incitives are just irrelevant as far as global social good is concerned.
And therein lies the uncomfortable truth: Collaborative opportunities take priority over veracity in publications every time.
Of course doing so is not free and it takes time. A paper represents at least months of work in data collection, analysis, writing, and editing though. A tarball seems like a relatively small amount of effort to provide an huge increase in confidence for the result.
IMHO this should be expected for any, literally any publication. If you have secrets, or proprietary information, fine - but then, you don't get to publish.
That's not right; retractions should only be for research misconduct cases. It is a problem with the article's recommendations too. Even if a correction is published that the results may not hold, the article should stay where it is.
But I agree with the point about replications, which are much needed. That was also the best part in the article, i.e. "stop citing single studies as definitive".
I read the paper as well. My background is mathematics and statistics and the data was quite frankly synthesised.
But the article is generally weird or even harmful too. Going to social media with these things and all; we have enough of that "pretty" stuff already.
However there are two problems with it. Firstly it's a step towards gamification and having tried that model in a fintech on reputation scoring, it was a bit of a disaster. Secondarily, very few studies are replicated in the first place unless there is a demand for linked research to replicate it before building on it.
There are also entire fields which are mostly populated by bullshit generators. And they actively avoid replication studies. Certain branches of psychology are rather interesting in that space.
Pushing for retraction just like that and going off to private sector is…idk it’s a decision.
She was just done with it then and a pharma company said "hey you fed up with this shit and like money?" and she was and does.
edit: as per the other comment, my background is mathematics and statistics after engineering. I went into software but still have connections back to academia which I left many years ago because it was a political mess more than anything. Oh and I also like money.
Citation studies are problematic and can and their use should be criticized. But this here is just warm air build on a fundamental misunderstanding of how to measure and interpret citation data.
This is a frustrating aspect of studies. You have to contact the authors for full datasets. I can see why it would not be possible to publish them in the past due to limited space in printed publications. In today's world though every paper should be required to have their full datasets published to a website for others to have access to in order to verify and replicate.
We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim. We shouldn't beleive anything unless it has strong arguments or data backing it. For science, we need the scientific method applied with skeptical review and/or replication. Our tools, like statistical methods and programs, must be vetted.
Like with logic, we shouldn't allow them to go beyond what's proven in this way. So, only the vetted claims are allowed as building blocks (premises) in newly-vetted work. The premises must be used how they were used before. If not, they are re-checked for the new circumstances. Then, the conclusions are stated with their preconditions and limitations to only he applied that way.
I imagine many non-scientists and taxpayers assumed what I described is how all these "scientific facts" and "consensus" vlaims were done. The opposite was true in most cases. So, we need to not onoy redo it but apply scientific method to the institutions themselves assessing their reliability. If they don't get reliable, they loose their funding and quickly.
(Note: There are groups in many fields doing real research and experimental science. We should highlight them as exemplars. Maybe let them take the lead in consulting for how to fix these problems.)
> We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim.
If you can't trust eyewitness claims, if you can't trust video or photographic or audio evidence, then how does one Find Truth? Nobody really seems to have a solid answer to this.
Next, we need to understand why that is, which should be trusted, and which can't be. Also, what methods to use in what contexts. We need to develop education for people about how humanity actually works. We can improve steadily over time.
On my end, I've been collecting resources that might be helpful. That includes Christ-centered theology with real-world application, philosophies of knowledge with guides on each one, differences between real vs organized science, biological impact on these, dealing with media bias (eg AllSides), worldview analyses, critical thinking (logic), statistical analyses (esp error spotting), writing correct code, and so on.
One day, I might try to put it together into a series that equips people to navigate all of this stuff. For right now, I'm using it as a refresher to improve my own abilities ahead of entering the Data Science field.
Scientists that have studied this over long periods of times and diverse population groups?
I've done this firsthand - remembered an event a particular way only to see video (in the old days, before easy video editing) and find out it... didn't quite happen as I remembered.
That's because human beings aren't video recorders. We're encoding emotions into sensor data, and get blinded by things like Weapon Focus and Selective Attention.
Much of what many learned about life came from their parents. That included lots of foundational knowledge that was either true or worked well enough.
You learned a ton in school from textbooks that you didn't personally verify.
You learned lots from media, online experts, etc. Much of which you couldn't verify.
In each case, they are making eyewitness claims that are a mix of first-hand and hearsay. Many books or journals report others' claims. So, even most education involves tons of hearsay claims.
So, how do scientists raised, educated, and informed by eyewitness claims write reports saying eyewitness testimony isn't reliable? How do scientists educated by tons of hearsay not believe eyewitness testimony is trustworthy?
Or did they personally do the scientific method on every claim, technique, machine, circuit, etc they ever considered using? And make all of it from first principles and raw materials? Did they never believe another person's claims?
Also, "scientists that have studied this over long periods of times and diverse population groups" is itself an eyewitness claim and hearsay if you want us to take your word for it. If we look up the studies, we're believing their eyewitness claims on faith while we've validated your claim that theirs exist.
It's clear most people have no idea how much they act on faith in others' word, even those scientists who claim to refute the value of it.
This one is pretty egregious.
I only needed the Spanish translation. Now I am proficient in spoken and written Spanish, and I can perfectly understand what is said, and yet I still ran the English through Google Translate and printed it out without really checking through it.
I got to the podium and there was a line where I said "electricity is in the air" (a metaphor, obviously) and the Spanish translation said "electricidad no está en el aire" and I was able to correct that on-the-fly, but I was pissed at Translate, and I badmouthed it for months. And sure, it was my fault for not proofing and vetting the entire output, but come on!
Actually it’s not science at all.
No real surprise. I'm pretty sure most academics spend little time critically reading sources and just scan to see if it broadly supports their point (like an undergrad would). Or just cite a source if another paper says it supports a point.
I've heard the most brutal thing an examiner can do in a viva vocce is to ask what a cited paper is about, lol.
“Your email is too long.”
This whole thing is filled with “yeah, no s**” and lmao.
More seriously, pretty sure the whole ESG thing has been debunked already, and those who care to know the truth already know it.
A good rule of thumb is to be skeptical of results that make you feel good because they “prove” what you want them to.
This can directly undermine the scientific process.
There has to be a better path forward.
> We should distinguish the person from the deed. We all know good people who do bad things
> They were just in situations where it was easier to do the bad thing than the good thing
I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"
In this case, it seems not owning up to the issues is the bad part. That's a choice they made. Actually, multiple choices at different times, it seems. If you keep choosing the easy path instead of the path that is right for those that depend on you, it's easier for me to just label you a bad person.
I happen to agree that labeling them as villains wouldn’t have been helpful to this story, but they didn’t do that.
> It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.
There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.
This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.
Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.
Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed. The root is then bad hiring decision and bad management of problematic people. You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.
Not necessarily, although certainly people sometimes fall into that trap. When dealing with a system you need to fix the system. Ejecting a single problematic person doesn't fix the underlying problem - how did that person get in the door in the first place? If they weren't problematic when they arrived, does that mean there were corrosive elements in the environment that led to the change?
When a person who is a cog within a larger machine fails that is more or less by definition also an instance of the system failing.
Of course individual intent is also important. If Joe dropped the production database intentionally then in addition to asking "how the hell did someone like him end up in this role in the first place" you will also want to eject him from the organization (or at least from that role). But focusing on individual intent is going to cloud the process and the systemic fix is much more important than any individual one.
There's also a (meta) systemic angle to the above. Not everyone involved in carrying out the process will be equally mature, objective, and deliberate (by which I mean that unfortunately any organization is likely to contain at least a few fairly toxic people). If people jump to conclusions or go on a witch hunt that can constitute a serious systemic dysfunction in and of itself. Rigidly adhering to a blameless procedure is a way to guard against that while still working towards the necessary systemic changes.
It's both obviously. To address the human cause, you have to call out the issues and put at risk the person's career by damaging their reputation. That's what this article is doing. You can't fix a person, but you can address their bad behavior in this way by creating consequences for the bad things.
Part of the root cause definitely is the friction aspect. The system is designed to make the bad thing easier, and when designing a system you need the good outcomes to be lower friction.
> This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.
The real conversations like that take place in places where there's no recordings, or anything left in writing. Don't assume they aren't taking place, or that they go how you think they go.
Post-mortems are a terrible place for handling HR issues. I'd much rather they be kept focused on processes and technical details, and human problem be kept private.
Dogpiling in public is an absolutely awful thing to encourage, especially as it turns from removing a problematic individual to looking for whoever the scapegoat is this time.
In a blame focused postmortem you say “Johnny fucked up” and close it.
When you are about accountability, the responsible parties are known or discovered if unknown and are responsible for prevention/response/repair/etc. The corrective action can incorporate and number of things, including getting rid of Johnny.
1) Basic morality (good vs evil) with total agency ascribed to the individual
2) Basic systems (good vs bad), with total agency ascribed to the system and people treated as perfectly rational machines (where most of the comments here seem to sit)
3) Blended system and morality, or "Systemic Morality": agency can be system-based or individual-based, and morality can be good or bad. This is the single largest rung, because there's a lot to digest here, and it's where a lot of folks get stuck on one ("you can't blame people for making rational decisions in a bad system") or the other ("you can't fault systems designed by fallible humans"). It's why there's a lot of "that's just the way things are" useless attitudes at present, because folks don't want to climb higher than this rung lest they risk becoming accountable for their decisions to themselves and others.
4) "Comprehensive Morality": an action is net good or bad because of the system and the human. A good human in a bad system is more likely to make bad choices via adherence to systemic rules, just as a bad human in a good system is likely to find and exploit weaknesses in said system for personal gain. You cannot ascribe blame to one or the other, but rather acknowledge both separately and together. Think "Good Place" logic, with all of its caveats (good people in bad systems overwhelmingly make things worse by acting in good faith towards bad outcomes) and strengths (predictability of the masses at scale).
5) "Historical Morality": a system or person is net good or bad because of repeated patterns of behaviors within the limitations (incentives/disincentives) of the environment. A person who routinely exploits the good faith of others and the existing incentive structure of a system purely for personal enrichment is a bad person; a system that repeatedly and deliberately incentivizes the exploitation of its members to drive negative outcomes is a bad system. Individual acts or outcomes are less important than patterns of behavior and results. Humans struggle with this one because we live moment-to-moment, and we ultimately dread being held to account for past actions we can no longer change or undo. Yet it's because of that degree of accountability - that you can and will be held to account for past harms, even in problematic systems - that we have the rule of law, and civilization as a result.
Like a lot of the commenters here, I sat squarely in the third rung for years before realizing that I wasn't actually smart, but instead incredibly ignorant and entitled by refusing to truly evaluate root causes of systemic or personal issues and address them accordingly. It's not enough to merely identify a given cause and call it a day, you have to do something to change or address it to reduce the future likelihood of negative behaviors and outcomes; it's how I can rationalize not necessarily faulting a homeless person in a system that fails to address underlying causes of homelessness and people incentivized not to show empathy or compassion towards them, but also rationalize vilifying the wealthy classes who, despite having infinite access to wealth and knowledge, willfully and repeatedly choose to harm others instead of improving things.
Villainy and Heroism can be useful labels that don't necessarily simplify or ignorantly abstract the greater picture, and I'd like to think any critically-thinking human can understand when someone is using those terms from the first rung of the ladder versus the top rung.
On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other.
The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world).
So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.
It's a paradox. We know for an absolute fact that changing the underlying system matters massively but we must continue to acknowledge the individual choice because the system of consequences and as importantly the system of shame keeps those who wouldn't act morally in check. So we punish the person who was probably lead poisoned the same as any other despite knowing that we are partially at fault for the system that lead to their misbehavior.
1. Who is responsible for adding guardrails to ensure all papers coming in are thoroughly checked & reviewed?
2. Who review these papers? Shouldn’t they own responsibility for accuracy?
3. How are we going to ensure this is not repeated by others?
I've read multiple times that a large percentage of the crime comes from a small group of people. Jail them, and the overall crime rate drops by that percentage.
Both views are maximalistic.
People are on average both bad and stupid and function without a framework of consequences and expectations where they expect to suffer and feel shame. They didn't make a mistake they stood in front of all their professional colleagues and published effectively what they knew were lies. The fact that they can publish lies and others are happy to build on lies ind indicates the whole community is a cancer. The fact that the community rejects calls for correction indicates its metastasized and at least as far as that particular community the patient is dead and there is nothing left to save.
They ought to be properly ridiculed and anyone who has published obvious trash should have any public funds yanked and become ineligible for life. People should watch their public ruin and consider their own future action.
If you consider the sheer amount of science that has turned out to be outright fraud in the last decade this is a crisis.
God gave us free will to choose good or evil in various circumstances. We need to recognize that in our assessments. We must reward good choices and address bad ones (eg the study authors'). We should also change environments to promote good and oppose evil so the pressures are pushing in the right direction.
However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.
Personally, I do believe that there are benefits to labelling others as villains if a certain threshold is met. It cognitively reduces strain by allowing us to blanket-label all of their acts as evil [0] (although with the drawback of occasionally accidentally labelling acts of good as evil), allowing us to prioritise more important things in life than the actions of what we call villains.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#The_reverse_halo_e...
If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.
The act itself is bad.
The human performing the act was misguided.
I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.
Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.
Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.
So the act and the person are separate.
Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.
But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.
Both can be pursued without immediately jumping to defending a crime
These failures aren’t on that list because they require active intent.
Blameless post-mortems are critical for fixing errors that allowed incident to happen.
It's not processes that can be fixed, it's just humans being stupid.
Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again.
It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person.
That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.
If we equate being bad to being ignorant, then those people are ignorant/bad (with the implication that if people knew better, they wouldn't do bad things)
I'm sure I'm over simplifying something, looking forward to reading responses.
Unfortunately academia as a pursuit has never had a larger headcount and the incentives to engage in misconduct have likely never been higher (and appear to be steadily increasing).
Surely the public discourse over the past decades has been steadily moving from substantive towards labeling each other villains, not the other way around.
This is effectively denying the existence of bad actors.
We can introspect into the exact motives behind bad behaviour once the paper is retracted. Until then, there is ongoing harm to public science.
For example, you assume that guy trying to cut the line is a horrible person and a megalomaniac because you've seen this like a thousand times. He really may be that, or maybe he's having an extraordinarily stressful day, or maybe he's just not integrated with the values of your society ("cutting the line is bad, no matter what") or anything else BUT none of all that really helps you think clearly. You just get angry and maybe raise your voice when you're warning him, because "you know" he won't understand otherwise. So you left your values now too because you are busy fighting a stereotype.
IMHO, correct course of action is assuming good faith even with bad actions, and even with persistent bad actions, and thinking about the productive things you can do to change the outcome, or decide that you cannot do anything.
You can perhaps warn the guy, and then if he ignores you, you can even go to security or pick another hill to die on.
I'm not saying that I can do this myself. I fail a lot, especially when driving. It doesn't mean I'm not working on it.
The act itself, of saying something other than the truth, is always more complex than saying the truth. ← It took more words to describe the act in that very sentence. Because there are two ideas, the truth and not the truth. If the two things match, you have a single idea. Simple.
Speaking personally, if someone's very first contact with me is a lie, they are to be avoided and disregarded. I don't even care what "kind of person" they are. In my world, they're instantly declared worthless. It works pretty well. I could of course be wrong, but I don't think I'm missing out on any rich life experiences by avoiding obvious liars. And getting to the root cause of their stuff or rehabilitating them is not a priority for me; that's their own job. They might amaze me tomorrow, who knows. But it's called judgment for a reason. Such is life in the high-pressure world of impressing rdiddly.
This is true though, and one of those awkward times where good ideals like science and critical feedback brush up against potentially ugly human things like pride and ego.
I read a quote recently, and I don't like it, but it's stuck with me because it feels like it's dancing around the same awkward truth:
"tact is the art of make a point without making an enemy"
I guess part of being human is accepting that we're all human and will occasionally fail to be a perfect human.
Sometimes we'll make mistakes in conducting research. Sometimes we'll make mistakes in handling mistakes we or others made. Sometimes these mistakes will chain together to create situations like the post describes.
Making mistakes is easy - it's such a part of being human we often don't even notice we do it. Learning you've made a mistake is the hard part, and correcting that mistake is often even harder. Providing critical feedback, as necessary as it might be, typically involves putting someone else through hardship. I think we should all be at least slightly afraid and apprehensive of doing that, even if it's for a greater good.
Whatever happens, avoid direct confrontation at all costs.
On the other hand, it sounds like this workplace has weak leadership - have you considered leaving for some place better? If the manager can’t do their job enough to give you decent feedback and stop a guy giving 10 min stand ups, LEAVE.
Reasons for not leaving? Ok, then don’t be a victim. Tell yourself you’re staying despite the management and focus on the positive.
Also if that doesn’t work, “Hey Bro I notice you like to give a lot of detail in standup. That’s great, but we want to keep it a short meeting so we try to focus on just the highlights and surfacing any key blockers. I don’t want to interrupt you, so if you like I can help you distill what you’ve worked on before the meeting starts.”
A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior
Certainly, you are aware we literally had more crime back then, right? Additionally, we heaped shame on people who did not deserve it, like women and black people and gay people.
So what the fuck good does that do?
You know what actually changed? White collar crime stopped being a thing.
This actually doesn't surprise much. I've seen a lot of variety in the ethical standards that people will publicly espouse.
Yes, the complicity is normal. No the complicity isn't right.
The banality of evil.
The obedience to authority that we must be able to challenge to stand a chance.
Milgram's or Zimbardo's tests we're somewhat flawed yes, but still WW2 and Germany kinda proved this tendency IMO. And that's why I brought it up. Perhaps not the best comparison, I admit, but a comparison that seems more and more relevant ni many cases.
These people are terrible at their job, perhaps a bit malicious too. They may be great people as friends and colleagues.
When the good thing is easier to do and they still knowingly pick the bad one for the love of the game?
The whole "bad vs good person" framing is probably not a very robust framework, never thought about it much, so if that's your position you might well be right. But it's not a consideration that escaped me, I reasoned under the same lens the person above did on intention.
> Vonnegut is not, I believe, talking about mere inauthenticity. He is talking about engaging in activities which do not agree with what we ourselves feel are our own core morals while telling ourselves, “This is not who I really am. I am just going along with this on the outside to get by.” Vonnegut’s message is that the separation I just described between how we act externally and who we really are is imaginary.
https://thewisdomdaily.com/mother-night-we-are-what-we-prete...
> If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused.
A strong claim that needs to be supported and actually the question who’s nuances are being discussed in this thread.
Anyone can do a bad deed.
Anyone can also be a good person to someone else.
If a bad deed automatically makes a bad person, those who recognize the person as good have a harder time reconciling the two realities. Simple.
Also, is the point recognizing bad people or getting rid of bad science. Like I said, choose your victories.
1. There are bad people
2. We know bad people are bad because they do bad things
3. There does not exist any set of bad actions that one could do to qualify one for the label of "bad person."
I've just come to the conclusion that a "bad person" is just a term for someone who does bad things, and for whom their extenuating circumstances don't count because they are the member of the wrong tribe.
1) errors happen, basically accidents.
2) errors are made, wrong or unexpected result for different intention.
3) errors are caused, the error case is the intended outcome. This is where "bad people" dwell.
Knowing and keeping silent about 1) and 2) makes any error 3). I think, we are on 2) in TFA. This needs to be addressed, most obviously through system change, esp. if actors seem to act rationally in the system (as the authors do) with broken outcomes.
For starters, the bar should be way higher than accusations from a random person.
For me,there's a red flag in the story: posting reviews and criticism of other papers is very mundane in academia. Some Nobel laureates even authored papers rejecting established theories. The very nature of peer review involves challenging claims.
So where is the author's paper featuring commentaries and letters, subjecting the author's own criticism to peer review?
And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about, mon semblable, mon frère.
> And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about...
No one is disputing any of this. The person who is capable, and who has chosen to do, the bad deed is morally blameworthy (subject to mitigating circumstances).
This is pretty standard virtue ethics we all learned in school. Your statements that morally blameworthiness and badness are "[n]ot the same thing...[a]t all" and that we should "[n]ever qualify the person, only the deed" make me think your moral framework is likely not linked to millennia of thought in this area from Socrates on down, so it's unlikely we will get anywhere and should "agree to disagree."
Other than just the label being difficult to apply, these factors also make the argument over who is a "bad person" not really productive and I will put those sorts of caveats into my writings because I just don't want to waste my time arguing the point. Like what does "bad person" even mean and is it even consistent across people? I think it makes a lot more sense to label them clearer labels which we have a lot more evidence for, like "untrustworthy scientist" (which you might think is a bad person inherently or not).
/s
I have a relative who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. A few years ago some guy got out of prison, went to a fellow's home to buy a car, shot the car owner dead, stole the car and drove it around until he got killed by the police.
One of the neighbors said, I kid you not, "he's a good kid"
But there is a concern which goes out of the "they" here. Actually, "they" could just as well not exist, and all narrative in the article be some LLM hallucination, we are still training ourself how we respond to this or that behavior we can observe and influence how we will act in the future.
If we go with the easy path labeling people as root cause, that's the habit we are forging for ourself. We are missing the opportunity to hone our sense of nuance and critical thought about the wider context which might be a better starting point to tackle the underlying issue.
Of course, name and shame is still there in the rhetorical toolbox, and everyone and their dog is able to use it even when rage and despair is all that stay in control of one mouth. Using it with relevant parcimony however is not going to happen from mere reactive habits.
For example, look at how people interact with LLMs. Lots of superstition (take a deep breath) not much reading about the underlying architecture.
Today the elites rule the plebs by saying "Science sasy so, so you must do this".
Author doesn't seem to understand this, the purpose of research papers is to be gospel, something to be believed, not scrutinized.
There is a reason scriptures were kept away from the oppressed, or only made available to them in a heavily censored form (e.g. the Slaves Bible).
In the past, the elites said "don't read the religious texts, WE will tell you what's in them."
Catholic and Orthodox Christianity do not focus as much on the Bible as Protestant Christianity. They are based on the tradition, of which the Bible is only a part, while the Protestant Reformation elevated the Bible above the tradition. (By a tortured analogy, you could say that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are common law Christianity, while Protestantism is civil law Christianity.)
From a Catholic or Orthodox perspective, there is a living tradition from the days of Jesus and the Apostles to present day. Some parts of it were written down and became the New Testament, but the parts that were left out were equally important. You cannot therefore understand the Bible without understanding the tradition, because it's only a partial account.
Living VPs Joe Biden — VP 2009–2017 (became President in 2021; after that he’s called a former VP and former president)
Not likely the one referenced after 2017 because he became president in 2021, so later citations would likely call him a former president instead of former VP.
Dan Quayle — VP 1989–1993, alive through 2026
Al Gore — VP 1993–2001, alive through 2026
Mike Pence — VP 2017–2021, alive through 2026
Kamala Harris — VP 2021–2025, alive through 2026
J.D. Vance — VP 2025–present (as of 2026)
The argument is that if you have a company, in the original meaning of a group of people working together with people individually paid per item they produce, where "new employees" (between quotes because they're not paid at that point) essentially train with more experienced employees to start producing more. The idea of management, introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor, is to have people specifically dedicated to studying and improving the workflow of people, to become experts at making the workflow better, now known as "Taylorism". That justified middle management, in that this optimization would increase a company's productivity, and that lead to people doing what middle management still does. Before Taylorism, outside of the company owners, employees competed for wages in a competition like in "Monsters, Inc", with no-one reporting to anyone.
There's a slight issue: Frederick Winslow Taylor was a con man. The experiment, introducing management, in reality lowered productivity by about 20%. It did not raise it. He kept "scientific records", measurements of productivity in a notebook and that notebook was presented to the owners of the railway. Turns out, he faked the numbers, both directly by just presenting fake numbers and by paying the company (as in the individual workers) more by faking accounts, resulting in a temporary boost in productivity. Oops.
Repeated experiments showed the same. Having everyone in a company directly responsible for the functioning of the company as a whole, by being held responsible, financially, for their own work, works ... better than having management layers, according to the experiments done on the subject. You will find the social sciences defend an entirely different view. Oops.
Has psychology or social sciences changed social sciences (specifically organizational psychology's) view on either Taylor or Scientific Management? No. They used it as one of the bases of the rest of psychology, of the rest of social sciences as if it was good science.
This was not the first, not the last, and certainly not the most serious problem in psychology or social sciences.
Some other famous problematic science. The Stanford prison experiment was faked [1]. Oops. No, that is not why people attack each other, it turns out it works far more direct. The Freudian view of psychology is not only thoroughly discredited, it is now strongly suspected that Sigmund Freud deliberately created this view to allow raping of women [2] (Freud is the person that created modern psychoanalysis, and he earned the equivalent of billions of dollars for getting rapists of the hook in court, he even had a few "successes", cases were rape victims got imprisoned, by order of a court that knew they were rape victims, in cases were the rapist was on trial. He got paid the very big Guilders for that). With that, of course, comes the reality that Freud was not an innocent scientist that came up with a wrong conclusion but a con man who caused incredible suffering for thousands of women, and hundreds of men (usually girls and boys that got raped). Autism is not an explanation of a condition of the human mind but, in the words of the creator/discoverer of Autism, Hans Asperger "serves to purify the genes of the noble Aryan race" [3] (note: yes, Autism's purpose was to purify genes by executing children). We know that being the victim of a crime raises the odds of the victim later imitating the perpetrator and committing the same crime, and to make matters worse this is a strong effect in unrelated adults, but it's stronger in adolescents, and also again stronger within families compared to between unrelated people. Note: this is not revenge, it's imitation. Victims commit the crime they were victimized by against other people, NOT the perpetrator (although if you look at it game theoretically it explains why human societies choose revenge punishments). Oops.
Psychology and social sciences are not positivist sciences. The purpose is not to explain the human mind, but to justify predetermined outcomes. Especially the "discovery of Autism" illustrates this perfectly. Autism does not explain the behavior of some children, not back then, not now, and back then it justified the locking up and even executions of undesirable children, something the political climate between the two world wars really wanted to happen. Yes, you see the reverse now, but only because the political climate has changed again, not because the attitude of those sciences has changed, and you should not be surprised that if Trump stays and, say, Le Pen gets into power in France, new "psychological discoveries" will ... suddenly turn out to justify what ICE is doing, and no doubt, worse. In fact I'd argue that's exactly what's starting to happen [4].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_Coverup (although frankly, look up what Freud's theory actually says and do you really need someone to tell you that is bullshit? Freud claims the only source of motivation for men and boys is to kill their father and rape their mother. And the only source of motivation for women and girls is to seduce men to rape them, preferably their own family. The point of Freud's theories, according to Freud's colleagues, is that it played really well in court: if a father raped his daughters or granddaughters or nieces or ... then he could not help it, it is human nature, and those daughters and nieces (and occasionally sons and nephews) really were really behind getting him to do it. Hence how does it make sense to punish him? Oh and Freud also offered services to treat/imprison those children/girls/women, of course at very high prices)
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/children-genetics-race...
For example there is a long history of studies of the relationship between working hours and productivity which is one of the few things that challenges the idea that longer hours means more output.
Social “sciences” are completely bastardizing the word science. Then, they come complaining that “society doesn’t trust science anymore”. They, the social “scientists”, the ones responsible for removing all meaning from the word science,
Even if you support sustainability, criticizing the paper will be treated as heresy by many.
Despite our idealistic vision of Science(tm), it is a human process done by humans with human motivations and human weaknesses.
From Galileo to today, we have repeatedly seen the enthusiastic willingness by majorities of scientists to crucify heretics (or sit by in silence) and to set aside scientific thinking and scientific process when it clashes against belief or orthodoxy or when it makes the difference whether you get tenure or publication.