Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data

&gt; Many researchers are privately terrified of being falsely accused by the &quot;data cops,&quot; one scientist said. But no one wants to criticize them because no one wants a target on their own back — including this individual, who was granted anonymity for this reason. &quot;Batman is a vigilante,&quot; the scientist said. &quot;So is the Joker.&quot;<p>&gt; For collaborators, it&#x27;s a stressful and infuriating time. When a paper is retracted, the research is erased, and all related citations are lost.<p>&gt; Others who attempted to build on Gino&#x27;s studies are grappling with having wasted time, money, and energy.<p>It feels, to me, that they&#x27;re making Data Colada (the data vigilante group) the bad guys here. It&#x27;s like blaming the Police for stopping a criminal because they took away the criminal&#x27;s source of income... I&#x27;m kinda uneasy with this line of editing :&#x2F;

I find it ironic that we have a reproducibility problem in many scientific disciplines, that we find that many notable scientists have been less than 100% honest in their research, that peer review fails to catch many of these errors, and still there are many people running around saying stupid bumper sticker slogans like “trust the science” and “I believe in science” and “95% of scientists agree…”<p>What we’ve learned is that scientists are human and they have all the human weaknesses and venality as any other group. The practice of science in the modern day (publish or perish, beg for grants, non-blind peer review, financial conflicts of interest, politically charged university atmosphere) is rife with incentives to predetermine desired outcomes rather than let the chips fall as they may. Individual scientists of course will fall all across the distribution of integrity.<p>I think the scientific method is one of, if not the greatest gifts the minds of the Renaissance gave us. BUT I refuse to be browbeaten by priests in lab coats or their acolytes. If you cite scientific papers in front of me trying to make a political case for a course of action, I will use my own judgment, informed by he paper as well as other factors like motivations and so forth.

&gt; When discussing Gino with Insider, multiple people brought up the idea of &quot;me-search&quot; — that researchers gravitate to topics that are of personal interest to them. &quot;We&#x27;re our own therapists, in a sense,&quot; Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral-science professor, said.<p>I guess that might be common with students picking psychology as a major, too. Noticed it with a few acquaintances of mine.<p>&gt; In a study about &quot;contagious dishonesty&quot; that Gino coauthored with Ariely, the researchers found that students were more likely to cheat if they saw someone they believed to also attend their university cheating.<p>That’s fascinating since both of them fabricated data. At least they can add themselves as the N+1 data point to their study. It’s retracted already, but still good enough for a TED talk or a book probably. &#x2F;s<p>Wonder if we have many sincere “coming clean” stories where they explain the thought process behind it. Why they did it, at what point did they decide to go through with it? Did they share their secret with others. Did they feel shame, etc.

In a similar vein, UPenn professor Angela Duckworth of &quot;Grit&quot; fame was caught misrepresenting statistics to embellish her claims a few years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;ed&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;479172868&#x2F;angela-duckworth-responds-to-a-new-critique-of-grit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;ed&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;479172868&#x2F;angela-...</a>. Who knew psychology had such questionable science?

For those of you interested in the accusations, here are the primary sources for them[1]. The are multiple (it is a 4-part series) and it looks quite damning.<p>[1] [[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): &quot;Clusterfake&quot;](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;109" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;109</a>)<p>[2] [[110] Data Falsificada (Part 2): &quot;My Class Year Is Harvard&quot;](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;110" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;110</a>)<p>[3] [[111] Data Falsificada (Part 3): &quot;The Cheaters Are Out of Order&quot;](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;111" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;111</a>)<p>[4] [[112] Data Falsificada (Part 4): &quot;Forgetting The Words&quot;](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;112" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;112</a>)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;dY6PE" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;dY6PE</a>

Might be worth mentioning that while not considered &quot;fake&quot; data per se, Amy Cuddy&#x27;s famous Power Poses research (one of the most popular TED talks) was debunked and she eventually left Harvard.

In the 6th grade I had a science project due, I of course had done nothing until the day before so I made up weeks of data in the form of journal entries from which bar and line charts were created since I was good with computers back when having pictures off the internet was considered fancy. My aim was just a passing grade and not being found out.<p>Lo an behold do I not only get put into the school&#x27;s science fair, I actually end up winning second place. This is actually how I became the science kid from then on and to live up to this name I went and invested more time into both math and science classes from then on. Eventually I went from an okay student to a top student and becoming a real scientist was something I always wished I had done.<p>Moral of the story?, there isn&#x27;t one... I just never realized just how much &#x27;real&#x27; science I was doing back then.

It amazes me that in modern times people are not required to publish their raw data. Doing so would (a) prevent errors in stats going unnoticed (b) remove the incentive to use statistics creatively (c) make it much easier and faster to find errors (d) make fraud detection easier.<p>Increasingly I think we should be offering either direct funding or bounties to groups that DO actually check this stuff, attempt replication etc. The days of &quot;a gentleman&#x27;s word is his bond&quot; are long gone (if they ever existed).

I think it’d be quite nice to celebrate process more than results. Investigating a topic and demonstrating lacks of correlation or causation is remarkably useful for future investigators. The opposite can be said if a result falsely gets promoted which causes others to waste time in attempts of reproduction or continuing a mostly failed path of analysis.

The &quot;multi-million dollar empire&quot; is a big part of the problem here. When scientists build a lucrative business that is based on the truth of some hypothesis they&#x27;ve been studying it immediately creates a conflict of interest. How can they ever be trusted to report results that would falsify the hypothesis?

Personally I&#x27;m less worried about outright-fake data than sloppiness. The article mentions Brian Wanskink; AFAIK he never deliberately invented anything but he did a whole bunch of p-hacking and his lab was so sloppy that data got mislabeled (one study allegedly done on 8-11 year olds was actually done on pre-schoolers). He was &quot;caught&quot; when he published a blog post[2] giving advice to young scientists and it went viral. Clearly no misconduct intended.<p>Most of this garbage research takes place in domains that don&#x27;t matter, where people are hardly taking the results seriously anyway (see also power posing). Typically when somebody actually cares about the truth of a result, they kick the tires and vet the result pretty thoroughly. The fraudulent LeCour and Green study from a few years ago was exposed by Brookman and Kalla, who were attempting a related study (rather than being science &quot;vigilantes&quot;).<p>But not always. Clearly people acting on Gino&#x27;s bogus research. The Reinhart-Rogoff paper [0] was discussed globally, and may have actually influenced fiscal policy. They used Excel for analysis, made a click-and-drag mistake, and improperly excluded a couple datapoints. It appears this exclusion was accidental [1]. Nevertheless, including those points changes the conclusion.<p>Catching this error took 3 years. It probably would&#x27;ve been caught faster if they had published their data alongside the paper, although apparently they actually did provide it upon request, so if people checked these things more frequently it would&#x27;ve been caught earlier.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt</a><p>[1] &quot;A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis.5 The omitted countries are selected alphabetically and, hence, likely randomly with respect to economic relationships.&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peri.umass.edu&#x2F;fileadmin&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;working_papers&#x2F;working_papers_301-350&#x2F;WP322.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peri.umass.edu&#x2F;fileadmin&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;working_papers&#x2F;working_p...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20170312041524&#x2F;http:&#x2F;www.brianwansink.com&#x2F;phd-advice&#x2F;the-grad-student-who-never-said-no" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20170312041524&#x2F;http:&#x2F;www.brianwa...</a>

I simply don&#x27;t get this. I say the same thing every time I hear of research&#x2F;scientific fraud.<p>I can understand why researchers want to commit fraud but why do they actually do it? Is it because they actually believe they can get away with it indefinitely, or are they gambling they can do so long enough to meet their goals—fool everyone long enough to get through their careers after which they couldn&#x27;t care less about their reputations?<p>I find it hard to believe these smart people actually believe they can get away with it. Surely they don&#x27;t and they must know their reputations will be ruined when they&#x27;re found out.<p>As sure as day follows night, they&#x27;ll eventually get caught out by others who are researching their papers and comparing their data with other researchers whether it&#x27;s within weeks of publication or decades later. And they must know that AI will expose them as it can automate comparisons with similar research and their data will be found to be anomalous.

I’m a big fan of open data but struggle to articulate its value in a quantified way other than just my gut feeling of more transparency leads to more collaboration leads to more research leads to more knowledge.<p>But I think examples like this mean that we’re getting closer to if a study doesn’t release all its data- raw, cleaned, and analytical tables- then it will be discounted or ignored. And there’s fame and money to be made in finding data irregularities.<p>We still need some way to audit and confirm data regularities, but that is boring and I think no money there. I’m not sure if there will be some chore assignment for students to pick a dataset, analyze it for rigor, and post results somewhere so every paper has a link to people who checked data and found it appropriate. I hope this means 99.9% of studies have proper data and not just when we hear about the (hopefully) rare studies that falsify or just don’t work with properly and make inaccurate conclusions.

The Very Bad Wizards podcast talked a little about this case in a recent episode (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;verybadwizards.com&#x2F;episode&#x2F;episode-263-free-yoel" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;verybadwizards.com&#x2F;episode&#x2F;episode-263-free-yoel</a> - main topic is also interesting, about a professor not getting hired for what seem like not-great reasons). The podcast notes include a link to the Data Colada post about the Gino fraud: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;109" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;109</a>

Trust the science.

Podcast that describes many of the specifics of how her and another researcher faked their data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;planet-money&#x2F;id290783428?i=1000622594562" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;planet-money&#x2F;id2907834...</a>

She just faked it until she made it...

Everybody putting down academia as shit. But somehow we still have GPS satellites, fibre optics and AI machinery that can nearly think.<p>I&#x27;d guess the shittiness may be isolated to a few disciplines, but that&#x27;s just a guess based on data.

Maybe our “top schools” really aren’t.

Why aren&#x27;t these scientists jailed for fraud? These people are low-life criminals and should face consequences for fraud, wasting grant money and peoples time. But they aren&#x27;t poors so they get special treatment.

Lock em&#x27; up

Can everyone stop focusing on accused persons? The court of public opinion should not rely on accusations. Donald Trump made a lot of accusations, and did you believe all of them upfront?

Everyone in academia knows that academia is shit.<p>People are warned well in advance by peers, professors and everywhere online, and yet they still do it.<p>Then, once the sunk cost creeps in, you can&#x27;t help but partake into the rotten system and wish to keep it as such.<p>Just leave and do private research, it&#x27;s not worth it

Why is is this old story getting frontaged so many times in one month?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastMonth&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=Honesty&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastMonth&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=tr...</a>