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Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

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Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#191

Post by adasdasdas »

hgsgm wrote: post #119
adasdasdas wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have incoherent answers to any question of right and wrong. Philosophers like to overcomplicate things and throw buzzwords too. I think it's a very difficult conversation full of emotional traps and personal biases. Once upon a time, we all shared the same moral foundation (religion) and did not have this problem.

We were "all" wrong, but at least we agreed! (Of course it wasn't really "all" , either within one community or between communities. People in power were just better about killing the weak people were just better about silencing people who disagreed.)

But I didn't say whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. In fact, I'm happy with some heterogeneity in our values, but I feel like you jumping the gun kind of proves my earlier point.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#192

Post by mike_hearn »

currymj wrote: post #164
paulpauper wrote: post #32

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.

life sciences is just as bad if not worse -- you can read news stories about many cases of outright photoshopped images in biology papers by respected researchers in major journals. physics has a good reputation, but then you hear of things like apparent fraud in that quantum computing paper about Majorana fermions... computer science actually seems relatively okay as far as avoiding outright fraud, probably because…

Life sciences is beyond the pale :( Lots of papers coming out of China are entirely fake and made to order by professional paper forging shops. Doctors have to be published to get promoted there, even if they are just regular hospital doctors and not professional researchers, so it leads to really bad incentives. Even the Chinese government's head of research integrity was found to be engaging in research fraud! But, nobody can do anything about it, as journals aren't interested in becoming research audit organizations. So they just publish floods of fraudulent work discussing non-existent interaction effects on random proteins and stuff.

Public health is in even worse shape. During COVID I was forced to conclude nobody in power was actually reading the papers that were driving policy. They'd regularly have major errors in them, like model code that was full of bugs or where things were stated about the real world as if they were clearly 100% true but the underlying paper stated the models had unrealistic assumptions! (same people making both statements). Universities didn't care about any of this.

I never saw outright fraud in CS but I've seen things that were getting close to the line in cryptography research. Some years ago there were a spate of research papers on Intel SGX that kept claiming they'd broken the security. When examined closely they all used an identical version of GNUtls in the enclaves for their proofs of concept. I got curious about why this specific version of this not very popular cryptography library kept cropping up as the reason for using it never seemed to be mentioned in the papers. Turns out that it's an ancient version, the last version before side channel mitigations were added. The techniques they were claiming broke SGX only worked if you ignored basic cryptographic best practices and used obsolete libraries. And last year there was a non-SGX case where the researchers claimed to be able to extract private keys over the network via side channel attack. The demonstration required the use of a very specific algorithm nobody actually uses, and required the target server to not be doing anything else, and for it to be saturated with traffic that did nothing except invoke this specific obscure algorithm and even then it took days. So this wasn't a realistic scenario anyone needed to worry about but it was presented as if it was.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#193

Post by red-iron-pine »

hawk_ wrote: post #165
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

Reading this makes me want some CSI like TV show based on forensics using statistics and excel files!

there are several of them on youtube. the most popular being related to sports statistics (e.g. SB nation)

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#194

Post by red-iron-pine »

bwestergard wrote: post #74
IggleSniggle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For similar reasons, I left academia. I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing. But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. Academia is entirely a “reputation” system, as it turns out, from paper publishing to student-evaluations to “public rankings.” As it turns out, the capitalist marketplace must also contend with the…

I'd like to hear more about how you've found more honesty in the private sector. "academia doesn’t really do this anymore" I've heard this from more than one current or former academic. Some argue it's due to market logic entering academia. It sounds like you take a different view?

> I'd like to hear more about how you've found more honesty in the private sector.

no intellectual wrangling, just make it rain.

and in my experience, the type-A super-go-hards are respectful enough to stab you in the front instead of in the back.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#195

Post by telotortium »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #161
LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should DEI teams be hiring people who are against [...] Yes, otherwise you're saying hiring is just a political test.

No it's not, lol. Logistically speaking, it makes zero sense to hire an anti-diversity advocate for a DEI role. Companies only have DEI teams because they want to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; they wouldn't hire someone who's actively going to detract from that effort. It'd be like hiring a reckless loudmouth who loves to make people look bad as your head of PR. Literally the opposite of what you need the…

Generally, the people in support of DEI are fond of the expression "the personal is political" or even "everything is political", so why wouldn't DEI be political? Given that it involves the organization of society and is controversial, DEI seems like the prototypical example of something political. It would be clearer for everyone if DEI openly accepted their role as political commissars.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#196

Post by red-iron-pine »

eru wrote: post #92
IggleSniggle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For similar reasons, I left academia. I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing. But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. Academia is entirely a “reputation” system, as it turns out, from paper publishing to student-evaluations to “public rankings.” As it turns out, the capitalist marketplace must also contend with the…

> But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. What do you mean by 'anymore'. Was there some golden age of bygone glory?

World Wars happened and everyone died. US schools had all the money and took off, and the handful of other institutions in the Old World did alright.

Lots of new science to uncover, a lot of which would be basic 100-200 level college courses these days. lotta new things to pioneer. my grandpa did a lot of work with plastics, for example, that are now pretty basic; new stuff then, but now no one thinks about their 0.9 cent plastic lid on their coffee.

lots of mobility but the world wasn't hyper connected, so you could do a trip to somewhere more obscure like Indonesia or Zimbabwe and do research. Now you can just email them the questionnaire.

Years of high schools pushing college now means there are legions of grads, plenty of whom will chase academia. smaller world + growing demand = ruthless academic posturing.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#197

Post by red-iron-pine »

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

ITT: we start to understand "Projection"

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#198

Post by spondylosaurus »

telotortium wrote: post #195
spondylosaurus wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not, lol. Logistically speaking, it makes zero sense to hire an anti-diversity advocate for a DEI role. Companies only have DEI teams because they want to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; they wouldn't hire someone who's actively going to detract from that effort. It'd be like hiring a reckless loudmouth who loves to make people look bad as your head of PR. Literally the opposite of what you need the…

Generally, the people in support of DEI are fond of the expression "the personal is political" or even "everything is political", so why wouldn't DEI be political? Given that it involves the organization of society and is controversial, DEI seems like the prototypical example of something political. It would be clearer for everyone if DEI openly accepted their role as political commissars.

I have literally never once heard language like that from DEI professionals; in every context I've encountered them, they've basically been an emissary of HR and had a "be nice but don't rock the boat" mentality, for better or for worse.

And I'm speaking as someone who falls into several ""diverse"" hiring categories. As much as I appreciate the philosophy of DEI work, I personally find most of it pretty toothless. There have even been multiple instances of myself and other rank-and-file coworkers trying to have discussions about bigotry at large (not even in the workplace itself), only to be shut down by those very same DEI coordinators under the guise of "let's use kind words instead of unkind words," because it's not good HR-speak to call a spade a spade.

Like, these are people employeed by huge corporate entities, not radical freedom fighters. A lot of it is just image work to make sure your company doesn't do or say shit that makes you look bad.

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#199

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #176
necovek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the guidelines is also to assume best intent: my point was not about paywall (which was admittedly a bad and superfluous excuse, yet I care not to expend time on it further). My intent was to highlight an inconsistency in naming a skill with a negative connotation (dishonesty). How can I more explicitly direct the conversation to why is this skill a "dishonesty expertise" (or rather, an "expert on (ethics and…

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... > Four replies deep into this thread, are we discussing topics of intellectual curiosity ... or ... something else? That itself is a strong indicator of the issue here. I strongly recommend pg's discussion of comments, particularly about their relationship to kudzu: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html >

[deleted]

Re: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

#200

Post by jjk166 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #186
jjk166 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is morality, not ethics. You would probably benefit from an ethics course.

M8 I took an ethics course. Thank goodness the professor taught me insightful things like "don't write software that hurts people" , I never would have thought of that myself! Don't write code for x-ray machines if I don't know what I'm doing.. got it! Incidentally I still have my assigned text from that course, right next to me in fact. "Cyberethics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace" Hmmm...

I meant a competent ethics course.
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