Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data

Everyone, please read the whole article, not just this comment. The second two quotes here appear very out of context in this comment - they are about anger and frustration towards Gino, not towards Data Colada.

The first quote here is not a defense of Gino, it's a nuanced opinion of self-proclaimed vigilantes who are also human and might not always make perfect decisions. It is followed by this:

> Discussing the allegations that Gino falsified data is seen almost unanimously as fair game, especially in light of Harvard putting her on leave. People expressed more mixed feelings toward disgraced researchers such as Cuddy, who failed to replicate her findings but did not fake her data.

I have no special insight here, but this at least seems like a reasonable thing to discuss.

> It feels, to me, that they're making Data Colada (the data vigilante group) the bad guys here.

I strongly disagree. The light questioning of Data Colada was a very small part of the article, and even that section did not give me the impression that they are "bad guys".

That narrative is insane. It is one thing to produce shoddy research. Even good senior researchers sometimes just have a paper that... doesn't work out well, with a late found flaw in the methods that can't be fully mitigated or uninteresting findings, and then they'd rather still try to publish it than shelve months of work. That's not good, but almost unavoidable in the current academic environment.

The accusations here are very different: Producing fake data is fraudulent, of course the papers need to be retracted, and people involved and in the know need to be punished. The quote from the article describes well something that seems to be a growing group of people within academia:

> It's possible "these people don't care and never cared about the science," Michael Sanders, a professor of public policy at King's College London, said. "They talk about science, and they talk about experiments, and they sort of wrap themselves in the fabric of the scientific method — just as a way of selling stuff."

Indeed. That's nasty. They throw in a detracting bit of racist accusations as well.

> all related citations are lost

What an extreme BS argument. It's really grasping at straws.

Guilt is a very effective way of keeping corrupt status quos going. Even if you change your ways, there is still dirt on you. The only way to break the cycle is if someone from the outside exposes the filth, or someone guilty on the inside decides to pick up his cross and accept the consequences of admission and exposure. On top of that, there are many who won't even entertain the possibility that the accused could be guilty even with evidence, because they have an emotional interest in preserving a false image of decency. Or they're terrified of the consequences of reporting the problem.

This is what happens with sex abuse. When there's enough guilt to go around in the right places, the guilty form a kind of hellish camaraderie, a Mexican standoff of pointing fingers. Once such people assume positions of power, they also have a tendency to concentrate corruption in the institution by favoring the corrupt. Doing so entrenches the standoff and eliminates those who would oppose or expose them. The so-called "lavender mafia" is a well-known example, because the media hate nothing more than the RCC, but this occurs everywhere and at greater rates.

What's important is what we distinguish between institutions and the people that temporarily occupy them. Good institutions should generally be preserved. It's the corruption that should be dealt with. Of course, that's not always an option. Sometimes, corruption destroys the institution, or perhaps the institution is beyond repair. But generally, there is a presumption in favor of cleaning house rather than abolition.

> it's like blaming the Police for stopping a criminal because they took away the criminal's source of income

Coming soon to a San Francisco near you!

I wonder if it's like a steroid doping situation:

What kinds of steroids and how much of them can I get away with using so I'm in the perfect spot where I am ahead my fellow doping athletes, but still under the bar of detection...

No one has ever been unfairly accused.

The bar for being accused is so incredibly high. People are given so many possible outs and are allowed to produce the most implausible explanations. And then, even having one or two faked papers basically has no impact.

Here's an example.

Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. Professors at Harvard. Despite having faked the paper that introduced austerity to the world, had an immense impact on the economy, and caused massive and needless suffering for hundreds of millions of people. That paper still continues to haunt countries today. To make their paper work they had to lie 3 times: to exclude some countries, exclude data from others selectively, and reweight all of the data. None of this is reported in their paper! Each of these took deliberate actions on their part, they cannot be mistakes. Every single "mistake" they made is carefully calculated to produce the result they want. Every one of them is needed otherwise their paper would be junk.

What happened to them? Well, Reinhart has been promoted to the Chief Economist of the World Bank and is still a professor at Harvard. Rogoff is still a professor at Harvard too. Their faked paper literally resulted in deaths, toppled governments, and the rise of the alt right in places like Greece.

But they got a promotion for it.

The only people who are afraid are the people who are faking their data. No real scientist is getting accused of anything here.

It's not ironic. It's a reflection of the fact that "scientists" are not an homogeneous group, and we are currently living through a slow-moving revolution in which some scientists are, broadly, taking a stand against fraud and attempting to dismantle the power/incentive structures that make it possible to perpetuate. The system is imperfect, and the work is in progress.

"Trust the science" is a poorly-phrased attempt to counter the persistent conspiracy theories that various science disciplines, and the scientists that work therein, are part of this or that conspiracy to reduce your freedoms, mislead the public, etc. Or the related conspiracy theory that science broadly is bullshit and that the primary motivation of any scientific study is the continued justification of funding, rather than pursuit of knowledge.

The fact that scientists can be wrong, some studies are faked or their results are overstated, etc. has little or nothing to do with it.

> I refuse to be browbeaten by priests in lab coats or their acolytes. If you cite scientific papers in front of me trying to make a political case for a course of action, I will use my own judgment, informed by he paper as well as other factors like motivations and so forth.

And this is exactly the kind of attitude that I described above. It's the ACAB approach applied to scientists, where it makes no sense if you look at what scientists actually do and care about. A huge number of scientists are persistently and actively fighting against the "priest in lab coat" archetype.

Peer review can't catch lies. It reviews your methodology and whether your findings are supported by your own data. If you outright falsify your data, peer review won't catch that. Replication catches lies.

Many studies, even those relied on for medical products, don't get replicated by independent entities.

It's safe to assume, any non-replicated study is an outright fabrication at this point.

9x% of scientists agree has always struck me as profoundly stupid. Are these scientists in the same field? Has there been a Galilean discovery that is not widely accepted yet? Who surveyed a statistically significant portion of “scientists”? What credentials does one need to be considered in that population? Does a master of computer science have authority on biology, physics, chemistry, ecology, geology, or any other number of fields?

I agree with you that papers shouldn't be treated like some holy text. That would go against the core of scientific method. We should inspect the core research.

That said, there are many who would use the fact that "humans are flawed" to throw out scientific research and distrust it. Scientific research will still be more reliable and dependable than the spew of others because there is rigor to it.

but the fact that this research is public and available is why frauds like Gino can be caught. This is the scientific method working. Media tends to amplify the hell out of the fantastical, fraudulent or not. But this IS the system working.

We may step in the wrong direction here and there, but we will inevitably push towards truth.

Reminder that "peer review" is part of the scientific journal system, not part of the scientific process itself. Journals have it done to serve their own interests, to save on paper/printing expenses and maintain their prestige. Peer reviewer isn't replication (which is actually important to the scientific process.) Google n-grams for "peer review" and you'll see that nobody was talking about it before the 1960s.

Yes, despite difficulty reproducing results in some fields, it still generally makes sense to trust scientific results. The scientific method is the best thing humanity has for establishing knowledge from empirical data.

Now if you'd prefer to put your faith in religion, or some demagogue, that's fine. And you're free to go eat all the horse paste you want. But overall dismissal of science as "stupid" is just a flat out ridiculous take.

One paper is no paper. Until it's been replicated, your study hasn't concluded yet.

> and still there are many people running around saying stupid bumper sticker slogans like “trust the science” and “I believe in science” and “95% of scientists agree

That has all to do with authoritarianism and how in partisan politics and during the covid draconian policies push (in many different countries) any dissent or non agreement was treated as a terrible sin that HAD to be punished.

Even nowadays, in HN, you'll get people repeating the mantra, downvoting and acting super obfuscated that someone dare point out that just because govs/tech/pharma/media sayd so, doesn't mean it's true, specially when we there's money and politics involved and that security or hygiene theater is nothing new.

There's a lot of wrong with your argument, but let's go down the list.

1. The optimal rate of fraud is not 0%, just like the optimal rate of shoplifting in a store is not 0%, and the optimal amount of crime in a society is not zero. Science, just like the grocery, and the street, has to operate on some degree of trust, and not non-stop big-brother gestapo police state surveillance. Just like a zero-crime society, a zero-scientific fraud society would have a lot of negative externalities that aren't accounted for by 'bring fraud down to zero' paperclip-maximizaiton. That's why it makes sense to talk about what can be done to reduce fraud, but makes no sense to throw yourself off a roof when an instance of it actually happens. It's a statistical inevitability. Look at the blast radius, pick up the pieces, have a conversation about what, if anything, could be done better next time.

2. If even one bit of dishonesty is enough to distrust a system, you shouldn't trust anything. But nobody actually thinks or operates in that kind of insane solipsism. You wouldn't get anything done.

3. What actually happens is that people from low-integrity fields (Politics, sponsored media, lobbying, organizational PR, internal corporate politics) are trying their fucking hardest to use that argument to bring public perception of everyone else down to their level. If they are blatantly lying half the time, and someone working in science blatantly lies, say, 0.5% of the time, and is blatantly wrong 5% of the time, and is mostly-right, but subtly wrong[0] the rest of it, that solipsist from #2 would look at it and conclude 'well, there's no difference'. He couldn't be more wrong, and I would like to gamble on loaded-dice games with anyone who disagrees with me on this point.

4. You shouldn't use a single paper, or two papers, or even fifteen papers as an arbiter of expert consensus. Papers disagree. Expert consensus is reached by looking at the whole body of a field. This requires extensive understanding of a field, which you're not going to get from clicking a few links over an afternoon.

5. You shouldn't use expert consensus as a definitive arbiter of truth.

6. But you sure as hell should defer to an expert, over your own judgement, about non-trivial technical matters. I don't care how smart you are and how many papers you read last week[1], I have serious doubts that you're going to be any good at performing, say, an open-heart surgery. There's a reason we leave it to the experts, even if what they know is wrong. [2] [3]

[0] Almost all of our understanding of the world is at least subtly wrong. That's fine, though, many bits of that understanding are, while subtly wrong, useful.

[1] It's a different story if you read ten years worth of papers. And not just the ones that support your biases. And also spent five to ten years working with, and for experts in the field, making a lot of mistakes along the way. You don't get mastery of a subject by reading, you do it by doing, making mistakes, and correcting them.

[2] What experts know is almost certainly, objectively wrong. But it's often useful, and better than blind stumbling.

[3] If we treated the low-integrity fields with an iota of the scrutiny you want to apply to the lab-coated tech-priests, half the world wouldn't have a job.

Those who say "trust the science" in the typical way it seems to be meant are rarely people who understand what science is. They're merely virtue signalling fan boys and groupies trying to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. Because that's why they say it. If the regime said "don't trust the science", they'd say that, but scientism happens to be the state religion.

I firmly believe that guys like Dawkins/Harris/Tyson have done substantial harm to a certain kind of person's perception of the world. One can quite easily see the worldview they espouse, in the broadest sense, is compatible with the worst of human tendencies and ideologies. I find people can gain utterly monstrous views about fellow human beings through the superiority they earn for simply "believing in Science."

The book Faking Science by Diederik Stapel is an excellent view behind the scenes of a serial academic fraudster.

I've never seen a coming clean story. But this has been going on at every scale for decades.

The scientific method isn't broken but the institutions that surround it and the people riding the tops of it tend to be. It'd be easy to fix but you'd instantly make a million high power enemies with psychopathic tendencies. Oh well.

> I guess that might be common with students picking psychology as a major, too. Noticed it with a few acquaintances of mine.

That's no secret. Any psych professor will tell you, it's rare to find a student (and consequently, psychologist) whose interest was not sparked by a personal history of mental illness.

I mean, people don't like to say it because you get taxed of being snobbish at best or lacking culture and being close-minded at worst but everyone know that "soft" sciences are mostly bullshit.

I started my eductation with a bachelor of maths and an engineering degree before doing a lot of economics while in business school. The field is full of interesting ideas but methodologically it mostly is garbage even you stick to the more mathematically oriented part of it. And that's economy which is supposed to be the most serious of the soft science.