The Mind of a Con Man (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Mind of a Con Man (2013)

nytimes.com

58 pointsgwern21 comments

Reading this:

> Rumors of fraud trailed Stapel from Groningen to Tilburg, but none raised enough suspicion to prompt investigation.

And this:

> The two students decided to report the charges to the department head, Marcel Zeelenberg. But they worried that Zeelenberg, Stapel’s friend, might come to his defense.

I'm reminded of a system to identify cases where there's widespread knowledge or suspicion of malfeasance, but people are reluctant to come forward. The nonprofit Sexual Health Innovations has created a system called Callisto, where you can report sexual abuse, but have the allegation locked until someone else has accused the same perpetrator of sexual abuse too. This is intended to help cases where someone abuses multiple people, but each is afraid that they won't be taken seriously because they're the only one coming forward.

A similar system might help to spot academic fraud. Here's an article about the system: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/college-sexual-assa...

Guilt escrow?

"The Mind of a Pathological Liar" might be a better title.

This is the "science" Feynman warned about.

> But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid.

The four most dangerous words are: "It just makes sense."

If it hasn't been subject to public testing by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference, it doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. It isn't knowledge.

Wow this is finally hitting the maintstream.

I've been following this case for awhile now. Retraction Watch http://retractionwatch.com/ has been detailing each of the retractions of his studies.

It's been entertaining to watch the growing clusterfuck.

This, in some part, is due to a large failing in the scientific community, namely the lack of reproduced studies. In the system we currently have, already starved for money, we fail to properly reproduce the findings of others. Most researchers are more concerned with their own findings than that of their colleagues, and when grant money is scarce, perhaps they are right to be.

There is a lot of bad science out there (as well as the outright fraud), but this shouldn't be used for an argument that science should be less funded or what have you. Instead, it should be used as valid argument to better fund and bolster reproducibility initiatives (such as validation.scienceexchange.com and others)

This was an interesting read, and highly concerning for me. While I am formally educated in computer science I enjoy psychology studies and collect research articles about group behavior, which I use as a basis for building simulations. For my purposes it doesn't really matter if the research failed to account for all the variables or makes weakly supported conclusion. I'm not trying to publish my own research, I just enjoy the reading and inspiration for projects. But fabricated research is another matter. The data isn't just inconclusive, the conclusion is made up. It may be reasonable, it may even be true, but the suggestions from the article are false and so contribute to an inaccurate model to understand the world.

How can someone like me, who enjoys the research but doesn't want to make a career out of it, keep up with it? Where can I go to find good, to the best of our current understanding, research (in psychology or other fields)? How can I identify meaningful research from the fluff? What resources are available to help me learn when or if research I read is found to be questionable or fabricated?

Or is scientific research out of reach for the common man? If I can't find the time to read all the citations and critically evaluate each article, am I better off just staying away?

Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

i think at some point everyone is one of those in life

So what. Not everyone fabricates data for a decade, lies to everyone around them about matters of enormous professional import, and endangers the career of everyone they've ever worked with, most of all their students.

The article talks about "good people doing bad things", which doesn't actually happen. We have a name for people who do bad things: we call them "bad people."

I thought we just called them "people".

Nope. Not everything is bad enough to be worth labelling "bad" and anyone who thinks there is no difference between any ordinary decent person who does their best to behave honestly, and some bottom-feeding scum like this guy is so morally flaccid as to be an embarrassment to vertebrates everywhere.

This liar got jobs based on his lies. The people who didn't get them were not--one would like to believe--publishing lies based on purely fabricated data. You'd have to be pretty evil to look those people in the eye and say, "Hey, your only problem was you were too honest! You didn't lie enough to get the job!"

Were they pure and unsullied? Of course not. But only a moral degenerate is incapable of telling the difference between a systematic, deliberate, serial liar like this guy and the ordinary rough and tumble of scientific life, in which we do our best to overcome our worst tendencies, and mostly succeed.

And you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane, drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal. You are hoping against hope that most people most of the time aren't lying and cheating their way through life, not faking research results or safety reports or maintenance logs. You are hoping, in short, that most people are not bad. So you might have the decency to demonstrate an awareness of that. It costs you nothing and we kind of appreciate it.

> you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane, drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal

And that's why there are no health scandals, no planes ever crash, no cars are ever recalled, and there are no food scandals either (including, but not limited to, crap being passed as food, or animals being fed their own brains, etc.)

The opposition psychologist "scientists" have shown towards any attempt to reproduce their findings mean this guy was not an outlier, but simply an extreme case of a general (human!) preference for story over facts.

Who's us, by the way?

pompous (affectedly grand, self-important)

Except that Machiavelli didn't believe what you attribute to him. Only the first of four items in your list did Machiavelli advocate in The Prince; none of the items you mention were virtues to Machiavelli in The Discourses. Even in the case of manipulation and deception by a prince (think governance not commerce) - Machiavelli viewed it as virtuous only given the state of affairs among the competing principalities and countries of the time. The Prince was Machiavelli's Leviathan, his answer to the nasty, brutish and short state of nature. Of note, Machiavelli was tortured by the Medici's so the sadism, in particular, he'd have found offensive.

Bernie Madoff had the same mentality. You get away with a little more each day until it's all you are. Sadly this type of story gives ammunition to those who decry science "if this guy can lie, maybe everyone lies."

I wonder why the graduate students went to Zeelenberg first, instead of straight to Eijlander.

It makes perfect sense that they would go to their department head. They knew him and most likely had a reasonable relationship with him given that they were comfortable discussing this over dinner/drinks; as opposed to a university administrator that they had no prior relationship with.

yea I was wondering that too and I think if I were in their shoes, I would have done just that thinking that the two were in cahoots.

Almost two years old and a dupe of 5622887.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5622887

Nothing wrong with that. From the FAQ:

Q: Are reposts ok?

A: If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

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