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Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

ft.com

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Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#51

Post by jjoonathan »

adamrezich wrote: post #33
jrockway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We saw the cracks in the foundations but we also saw the foundations.

It cracks me up every time an alt media source throws shit at mainstream media for having journalistic standards that are far from perfect but still higher on an absolute level than said alt media. Retraction policies, always asking the accused for comment, citing sources, the list goes on. Unfortunately, it seems that people are more impressed by performative hatred of mainstream media than they are by the exercise of actual journalistic integrity, so I guess things will just get worse until (I have to hope) we figure it out again. Ah well, so it goes.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#52

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

A very very long time ago I did some programming to help a friend of a friend analyze a data set. The data set was from public schools and it was being used to inform some policies at the state level. All I can say is, the data submitted from many schools had very disturbing patterns of regularity (as in identical records on many unexpected metrics that you would not expect) ... like 10 or 15 records in a row, in the same rough geographic area (we didn't have exact addresses) with the exact same scores in all subjects as well as reading and match assessments. Basically it looked like someone had copy pasted rows of data over and over while keeping the original unique ID numbers (end result, different ID numbers representing different students, all having the exact same scores). And guess what ... whenever I saw that pattern, the scores were all very much above average. You didn't see that pattern with below average scores.

I told the person I was working with about the data and suggested it was fraudulent and she became concerned and raised it with her supervisor. Within about 24 hours I no longer had access to the data sets. And the friend of a friend just said that she didn't need help anymore.

I suppose I could have raised a fuss and contacted a journalist but all I had was columns of data without context. Plus at the time I'm ashamed to say I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft and not inclined to do much else that required effort.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#53

Post by fasterik »

WalterBright wrote: post #47
rqtwteye wrote: post #43

There is this pattern where things are always the opposite of their message: - Dishonesty expert is dishonest - Politicians who constantly talk about freedom want to restrict anything that doesn't fit their world view - Militant anti-gay preachers hire call boys - Diversity teams are the least diverse

I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.

Ethical theory is an interesting subject in its own right. Even if studying it doesn't make you a better person, that doesn't make it useless, any more than studying abstract areas of math or physics is useless.

That being said, some work in practical ethics has had a huge impact. Peter Singer's work on animal ethics started the modern animal rights movement, and his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" has inspired many people to donate a lot more to charity than they otherwise would.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#56

Post by jjk166 »

WalterBright wrote: post #47
rqtwteye wrote: post #43

There is this pattern where things are always the opposite of their message: - Dishonesty expert is dishonest - Politicians who constantly talk about freedom want to restrict anything that doesn't fit their world view - Militant anti-gay preachers hire call boys - Diversity teams are the least diverse

I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.

There is a distinction between understanding and practicing ethics. It's like taking a course on leadership vs being a good leader - some people might have a legitimate desire to be a good leader, but not know the best techniques; taking a course allows them to understand how to be a good leader so that they might become one. As another example, an atheist could study theology not to better practice religion but merely to better understand it.

Someone can likewise have every intention of being ethical, but just be bad at it. Conversely, someone could know ethics well and simply choose to disregard them and do unethical things anyways. An ethicist isn't necessarily someone who practices ethics particularly well, it's someone who understands the concepts of ethics well.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#58

Post by mupuff1234 »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #6

The title is clickbait in the sense that it suggests that we should expect this person to be super honest, and instead they were found to be dishonest. On the contrary, I think we should expect them to be dishonest, and they are. They literally have a book named “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”, what did you expect? Of course they're dishonest.

The title accurately represents what happened, wouldn't call that clickbait.

The story is just entertaining.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#59

Post by rossdavidh »

Trombone12 wrote: post #15
jamessb wrote: post #4

The FT article says: 'A group of academics who compile the Data Colada blog about the evidence behind behavioural science has started publishing a series of posts in which they say they will detail “evidence of fraud in four academic papers” co-authored by Gino'. The first two of these blog posts are: https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/110

From the second link: > students approached this “Year in School” question in a number of different ways. For example, a junior might have written “junior”, or “2016” or “class of 2016” or “3” (to signify that they are in their third year). All of these responses are reasonable. > A less reasonable response is “Harvard” [...] Nevertheless, the data file indicates that 20 students did so. Moreover, and adding to the p…

It all suggests that, in addition to falsifying data, they had become so blase about falsifying data that they weren't particularly careful about it. Which suggests that they may have been falsifying data for a long time...

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#60

Post by dahwolf »

WalterBright wrote: post #47
rqtwteye wrote: post #43

There is this pattern where things are always the opposite of their message: - Dishonesty expert is dishonest - Politicians who constantly talk about freedom want to restrict anything that doesn't fit their world view - Militant anti-gay preachers hire call boys - Diversity teams are the least diverse

I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.

Similar to a dating coach that has hundreds of dates to draw expertise from, making them actually terrible at dating, if the point is to form long term relationships.
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