Item — HN Reader

Dan despicable Ariely is a good example because he also milked personal tragedies.

Ariely et al that you mention weren't questioned or exposed any less though. There was Elizabeth Holmes too.

The point is, if you cannot bear getting exposed as a false god, as a con, then don't try to become one. Well don't, even you can bear the exposure.

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I don’t know. Seems like a distorted sense of justice to me. I am not so sure that academic fraud is in the same league as committing felonies (like E Holmes). Also don’t know that anything beyond professional sanction is deserved for professional misconduct (that is not breaking any laws or endangering people).

Perhaps their real crimes were not having better PR, or enough money to hire a crisis management firm. Whatever it was, it really seems to have brought out the worst (in) people.

Academic fraud is a crime. It gets used on grant applications to justify funding, meaning it's stealing money from the government and thus the public. It can be prosecuted as fraud in the courts. See the case of the Dana Farber Cancer Center being taken to court on behalf of the US Government by Sholto David (who won a large settlement).

> Perhaps their real crimes were not having better PR, or enough money to hire a crisis management firm.

He hired Carter Ruck, a professional law firm, who then bullied The Times with legal threats that themselves contained by lies by Arday. And he had been given nothing less than glowing PR by every "serious" institution in Britain, which all repeated his lies without question up until a few days ago.

Good PR and funds for crisis management were not an issue for him.

I don't agree. In one case a person is raising financial capital, in others they're raising social or political capital. All such frauds upon the public are bad and I think there's something wrong with society only treating it as a crime when a currency symbol is involved. It's not just the investors (financial or professional or...) who lose out; people who were correctly skeptical in advance of the public revelation are often attacked or sidelined for expressing doubt about a fabricator's grandiose claims.