I went to high school with Brian Wansink. He is brilliant, funny, and affable. I could hear his voice speaking his responses to the objections raised, and snickered a little bit.
I'm sure that Wansink cares about his research and its quality. He's that sort of person. I don't know what happened with these papers, but it seems likely that answering bloggers publicly would not serve the greater good.
It seems to me that all the hand-wringing about these four papers misses the bigger picture: What can we do to improve the practice of science across the board? Why is there almost no field of study which isn't tainted by the politics of left vs. right?
My suggestion is that it began when people began to believe the idea that all political and social questions are best served with some sort of applied scientific analysis. I counter that, in fact, scientists are some of the worst people to ask for solutions to political and social problems, since most of them have almost no understanding of the relevant fields of study, which mainly include history and philosophy, and perhaps psychology. Even fields like theology, linguistics, and literature and the arts have more to say to most political problems than, say, physics or chemistry or meteorology, because they speak to human behavior rather than the behavior of inanimate substances.
Please understand that I say all this not to provoke an argument, necessarily. But as someone whose formal studies were mostly in political history, in general, listening to HN talk about politics is a lot like what I must imagine it is for most on HN to listen to people on TV news shows talk about tech in general and software in particular: they sort of get it, but not really, and certainly are not as expert as they imagine themselves to be.