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Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

ft.com

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Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#31

Post by m463 »

wittjeff wrote: post #17

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely , author of (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies, later accused of data fraud and academic misconduct.

I read his dishonesty book and now I wonder if any of it is actually wrong (although most of it made sense at the time)

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#32

Post by paulpauper »

Maybe he is to blame, but the social sciences in general are inherently vulnerable to this sort of problem. There have been many instances of similar incidents over the past few decades or so. not just overt academic fraud but misconstruction of data, excel errors, poor methodology, publication bias, etc. This calls into doubt if anything in the social sciences can really be trusted.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#33

Post by adamrezich »

jrockway wrote: post #20
anoxor wrote: post #7

We have decided we are a post-truth society. Turns out solving that problem is non-trivial when we rely on experts that are themselves human who view the world as post-truth.

We've always been a post-truth society. I think it's just how humans are. We want easy answers, and if there are none, we invent them. I don't think that the human from 1AD is better than the human from 2023AD for example. What we used to blame on God we now blame on 5G or whatever. Same stuff, different details. What has changed in the past 2000 years is the availability of information. Nothing is 100% true other th…

yeah but we had that really comfortable era for awhile there, where mass information dissemination was centralized in the hands of a few major institutions, so everyone was more or less on the same page—all you had to do was pick up a newspaper, or listen to the radio, or watch news on television.

this gave us the illusion that we were in a world of Truth, because why would these centralized corporations ever lie to us, or massage the facts in any way? it's The News, of course it's inherently trustworthy.

then the Web came about, causing some to see cracks in the foundations. then the iPhone was released, social media took off, and now the news monoculture is almost (but not quite) dead, and we're back to fending for ourselves in this onslaught of information.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#34

Post by zetazzed »

Individual researchers have huge incentives for fraud, but large universities are the ones who most need to look inward here. HBS could become a beacon for stronger research practices in this area - requiring study preregistration and data collection methods that carefully trace provenance and changes. If HBS has fewer but better quirky marketing psychology studies, their reputation will do well. However for an individual researcher, the benefits to using extremely rigorous practices are not as clear, while the costs are high. A random grad student is not going to be able to establish a norm of data traceability.

I worked in this area (at Harvard as well) a bit as a grad student and can absolutely understand the temptation for the lighter version of this. If you can drop one outlier group, you get a cool story and a job at a top 10 b-school. Or keep it, get a muddled result, and try again for a better paper next year. I ended up just leaving the field entirely as the whole "our system massively rewards dodgy practices" vibe really bummed me out.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#38

Post by hammock »

wittjeff wrote: post #17

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely , author of (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies, later accused of data fraud and academic misconduct.

Also Jonah Lehrer, author of pop science books Imagine and How We Decide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#40

Post by tobinfricke »

m463 wrote: post #31
wittjeff wrote: post #17

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely , author of (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies, later accused of data fraud and academic misconduct.

I read his dishonesty book and now I wonder if any of it is actually wrong (although most of it made sense at the time)

Is Dan Ariely implicated in any of this? My understanding was that he was cleared.
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