Dan Ariely has a long history of controversies and studies with falsified data. He wrote 3 popular books and gained a lot of fame before others started uncovering the problems in his studies
It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with his research.
The fraud that Data Colada presents here is unambiguous. It was also no accident in my opinion that they are specifically mentioning that the 3 Excel files were “Last saved by” “Dan Ariely”
I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired for this, but I really wish the Feds would prosecute cases like this as wire fraud instead of leaving insular academic institutions to self-police. This type of fraud is done for personal gain and self-enrichment and causes real, identifiable harms.
I'd be pretty wary of stretching wire fraud law to cover this. Prosecutors deciding whether scientific results are fraudulent sounds like it could create its own set of ugly incentives
Fraud law doesn't need to be stretched, academic fraud is covered and criminally prosecutable in the USA for decades. It has to be because they're using these results to apply for grants paid from tax monies.
Occasionally someone is even prosecuted! Unfortunately, even when the government wins, the institutions just treat the resulting fines as a cost of business. See the Dana Farber Cancer Center: prosecuted by a third party on behalf of the government, found guilty of faking their science for a decade+, paid the fine - and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it.
> and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it
That doesn't really surprise or bother me - I wouldn't exactly say it was a coverup just because they aren't heralding some major Fed case against them on their own website. But I do find it shitty that the Wikipedia page of Dr. Laurie Glimcher, who was president of the institute at the time, had some papers retracted and apparently resigned over the issue, makes it sound like she just retired because she completed her mission and has no mention of the scandal.
The bigger issue I see is that someone wasn't prosecuted, just the institution. I didn't spend a ton of time looking, but AFAICT no individual faced any serious consequences beyond "reputational damage". This is why the "corporations are people" shit is so aggravating. If corporations are people, then some people who committed these crimes should have faced legal consequences, not just have their malfeasance paid out by the organization.
Prosecutors (and juries) already are expected to adjudicate fraud across cases that IMO are much more ambiguous than this.
I think it's fair to debate whether it's a good thing that, as I heard it put once, "everything is wire fraud" (i.e. lots of crimes require lying on documents that are sent electronically and thus become federal crimes), but I see zero reason to think that committing academic fraud (which, again, is done for personal gain and causes real, measurable harm to others) is any less of a crime than lots of other things that are prosecuted as wire fraud.
Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.
>Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake.
It works in systems where money is at stake too. You need a high trust, conscientous society. Doesn't mean that having one solves the issue entirely. The ocassional bad apple will fraud there too, but it wont be rampant enough to be a systemic problem.
>When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that.
You don't need independently wealthy scientists to expose fraud.
You just need an environment where if regular salary dependent scientists expose fraud, they're not punished for it.
If you don't have that, sure, then you need independently wealthy scientists to dare.
>Do you know a trick to pay my bills in self-respect? Most of my creditors demand I pay in money.
Nobody said that shit. You can pay your builds with the monetary salary from doing your job honestly. That was my first point.
If many people discover that such a salary is not enough to get by, or if many people aren't content with "enough to get by" and decide to perform academic fraud for extras, then that's a society that already lost the plot. That was my second point.
> leaving insular academic institutions to self-police
I'm not convinced that academic institutions are actually self-policing, it may not even be correct to assume they each act as one coherent entity. There are a lot of incentives in play which may not be obvious from the outside.
Many decades ago during my PhD I was in working in a chemistry lab when a colleague had an accident which caused a minor explosion, big enough to blow both of the glass side panes completely out of his fume hood.
With hindsight he was extremely lucky to have only minor injuries, he was peppered with tiny cuts from the flying glass and temporarily deaf from the bang.
I called for an ambulance, which seemed like a reasonable response.
The first prof on the scene (not our prof though!) came in and immediately asked "who phoned for the emergency services?", so I said it was me. He then gave me a bit of a telling-off, ending with him saying "and now the press will find out!" before he stormed off.
I remember thinking "wtf?! my colleague has just blown up our lab, and your top concern is that it will be in the newspapers"...
> The fallout from the saga is likely to continue. Simonsohn and several of Gino’s co-authors last year launched a project to assess the reliability of her past papers. So far, this has led to a further retraction in February and a correction in July. Science reported in April that Gino also appeared to have plagiarized passages of text in some of her publications.
It’s also hilarious how the judge let her continue the suit against Harvard. Like “hey I plagiarized fine, but you focused on my plagiarism more than others’ that not fair”. Even as more retractions due to plagiarism kept coming…
I think we've seen recently that it is a dark kind of funny. When your standards for catching fraud are as low as top academia, and expectations might be beyond the probable without it, it creates a conundrum when someone with a prejudice starts to pick targets to actually investigate.
IANAL, but it seems the suit against Harvard is still in progress, as far as I can tell: Harvard is seeking a summary judgement, and on August 5 the judge granted Gino's request to file "a renewed Statement of Additional Material Facts that complies with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Court's Standing Order, including the requirements governing format and organization" [1] with 14 days to reply and 14 days thereafter for Harvard to respond in turn. It looks like Gino's team filed the former on August 26 [2].
From the Introduction, the gist of this statement seems (to me) to be that Harvard's finding of grave misconduct cannot simply be taken as being correct, and so the issue should be put to a jury.
Harvard has counter-sued, apparently alleging that Gino had altered and backdated an Excel file presented as evidence that Harvard's investigation had used the wrong data - a claim which which she, of course, denies.
A year ago, the judge denied Data Colada's request for Gino to reimburse their legal fees after the dismissal of the case against them, which strikes me as unfortunate.
We'd find problems with many if not most published studies if we scutinized them the same way. People like him get discovered because they step out of their academic bubble into the light of the world stage.
And mind you this is psychology, the entire discipline is only borderline scientific anyway. But even studies in the hard sciences are very often flawed if not outright fabricated. Adjusting data sets to fit the desired result (who'd ever know as long as you do it properly), changing the experiment and measure until they get what they they want, repeated measuring until the "right" data for the paper appeared randomly - those are all things I personally observed in the lab.
Not to even get started on the house of cards that is basing ones flawed assumptions on other flawed studies without even the slightest attempt at replicating their results first. It's standard practice to simply presume what's been published (especially by friendly authors) can be regarded as reliable.
It is still seared into my mind when a PhD openly stated in a meeting once that she likes to draw the graphs she needs for her papers and then goes looking for the data she needs to support it. I’m sure I can imaging what kind of looking she did based on the fact that she was little more than a slick, fast talking, skin revealing, fast moving, usual suspect con man.
> draw the graphs she needs for her papers and then goes looking for the data she needs to support it
This is a vague statement and it's super important to be precise when blaming someone. I think what you meant is - sketch out the graphs with patterns that support the alternative hypothesis/interesting result and then look for data that make the 'real' patterns look like those in the sketch?
The problem in my view is that everything can be measured like hard science in the first place (not to mention the issue with fraud you point out in hard science).
I am think the idea that a thing is only a science if and only if it's empirical is actually harmful, science used to refer to a more generalized idea of study 'scientia' this could also be mathematics or theology. Then natural science begins to eat the term and becomes more limited. I think that the current place we are is one that is actually has a very dim view of anyone thinking about a topic and is naively optimistic about experimentation in general.
For if one looks at Aristotle theories ideas one may laugh given what we know now, despite using empirical reasoning for lots of his observations, Never the less I think where useful at the time as it's great for a theory to be good but failing that if a theory can usefully explain phenomena and provide one with mastery of phenomena in some limited way it's still useful.
Occam's often abused razor is a way of building theories like this and this whole process is similar to compression, given observable phenomena how do we explain phenomena in the most simple way, this process uses experimental and empirical data but requires thinking about the results of all experiments deeply.
From an outsiders view Natural science's largely seem to have pretty good major theories that lots of results of experiments can be used to correct constants of some kind in the theory and a well established field of study of theoretical physics that largely seems to be operating in the way I outlined.
But the social sciences are rather stupidly obsessed by these little experiment and no one has the guts to build bigger theories these days, for any theory of the human mind has to deal with many variables and if one wants to have descriptive theories of human mind then one needs to do a lot of thinking and theorizing and sometimes separate form empirical data and then arguing the theories using the data and reject the theories using the data, but also other kinds of analysis.
I have the most dim view of modern political science and sociology even more so, they tend to adopt this way of operating the most and to actually operate in that realm they need to theorize the most and experimental data is hard to do properly (and do not neglect history one bit, this is are experimental data and is as good as we can get).
Until you have an objective way of measuring pain in a subject it’s not truly scientific. Hence the endless stream of opioid users lying at the hospital to get their fix.
At this point the surprising part isn't that another Ariely result has problems, it's that some of these datasets apparently went decades without this kind of basic scrutiny
> In 2006, when he was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, Ariely conducted experiments including administering electric shocks with a research assistant who had no human–subject training. […] Ariely confirmed this and said that he wasn't aware that the research assistant did not have the needed one-hour online human–subject training.
A one-hour online training is all that’s needed to be considered ready to conduct experiments involving things like electric shocks on human subjects?
Forget about this guy, the entire field needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
I would not make such a harsh judgment just because electric shocks are involved.
During my master’s I took a class at the Media Lab called Human 2.0 on prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons, and human augmentation. Unsurprisingly, all student final projects involved some form of human experimentation.
To run our final project’s experiments, we had to complete a few online modules on bioethics, first aid, and safe practices, as well as submit a proposal to the IRB. From what I saw across projects, the board applied appropriate scrutiny and made helpful contributions.
It classified our experiment as low risk, and a lot of care went into participant selection and adherence to the approved protocol, but they did not require any health professional to be present during the sessions.
Other projects, however, did require such support and even had some MIT Medical involvement.
Incidentally, my project also involved administering electrical shocks to subjects, albeit very mild ones (tACS to induce directed visual artifacts).
I don't know the details here but I am a psychologist.
The "electric shock" normally used in psych studies is tiny, it's like the equivalent of one of those little toy prank buzzers. You couldn't possibly hurt someone with it, this is really a non-issue.
Related side note: Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effects compared to e.g. SSRIs, and is very effective for severe depression. It's a huge shame that it's undeserved reputation prevents it from being more popular. Blame "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for its inaccurate portrayal.
ECT can be very, very unsafe. 70% of patients experience some form of memory loss and at least 30% of patients experience self-reported permanent memory loss. The rate of major adverse cardiac events found in a 2019 meta-analysis was 1 in 39 patients. For the people that it helps, I'm happy they've found relief, but it's a tool with significant costs and I know a fair amount of people who underwent it as children or otherwise were pressured to undergo it and I don't know any of them who have a positive impression of it.
This isn't responsive to the parent's question, in a way that ironically underscores the point: you can tell me that "1 in 50 patients experience X", but that's meaningless, unless I know what X is in the selected population at baseline.
I don't mean to pick on you. This problem is widespread in academic research.
> Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effects Blame "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for its inaccurate portrayal.
YMMV. I’ve encountered people who have had ECT forced on them whilst inadequately sedated. They have been older/elderly but it would be a mistake assuming it’s always without causing harm.
There are multiple accounts that describe severe pain and the New Zealand government has paid out compensation for the torture that it was. What was being done here was most definitely intended to be painful torture, so maybe isn’t a fair comparison with clinical ECT for actual treatment?
‘Bryon Nichol spent six months in the Lake Alice unit at the age of 12. He said he received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) many times, which was always unmodified, and without a muscle relaxing anaesthetic.
"The nurses would come down and drag me upstairs. I was often so petrified that I soiled myself. They would put a mouthguard in my mouth and held me down while Dr Leeks gave me ECT. The ECT would give me vicious pains in my head and make me feel dizzy and as it continued the pain got worse. My arms and legs flailed about. It was absolute agony."’
And another:
‘Rangi Wickcliffe, 59, is another survivor of the Lake Alice unit.
He was 10 when he was first given electric shock treatment. Dr Selwyn Leeks turned the machine on, the pain that you feel from the electricity surging through your head is indescribable. The scream that comes out of your mouth is also indescribable.
"The terror was so intense that you lost all bowel movement."
He said it felt like his bones would break.’
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t even thinking about the physical danger when I was… shocked… that you only need a one hour online course. It’s that they’re interacting with people in a somewhat clinical way as an implicit authority. The shock would obviously cause discomfort and therefore stress (or why even do it).
Do you think a potential bad actor would change their behavior if they took, say, a 12 hour course instead?
I am of course biased, but I have often been exasperated by the various "trainings", IRB processes, ethics classes, etc, that are required to run even basic psychology studies such as surveys.
Meanwhile, down the hall, the medical department is opening the skulls of mice, implanting electrodes, giving them supercancer, and then euthanizing them en masse. Often with less approval burden.
The hard truth is that it's tricky to decide what's ethical in science; we mostly allow or disallow things because they've been done that way for years, and all the added "process" is nothing but paper pushing and ass covering to quiet concerned outsiders.
> Do you think a potential bad actor would change their behavior
What is the appropriate way to help a righteous but underpaid lab assistant find the guts to call out a process as unethical and insist that the boss’s claim that the IRB has approved it is bogus?
The most important thing is they know how to report issues and have assurance that reports will not hurt them. If you can show other reports were acted on and the reporter not harmed that helps.
It also helps to always have more than one person who could call so they compete with each other to be first because they don't want to be the one seen as an accompanist to fraud.
It’s not about bad actors. It’s about putting untrained people in a position where subjects might be vulnerable and come to depend on them being the trusted expert in the room.
> Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effects compared to e.g. SSRIs, and is very effective for severe depression.
The evidence base for these claims appears to be missing.
It's liked by some practitioners, not by others, but actual studies in this area are low quality, didn't follow up with longer term checks, and are generally inadequate.
"The failure to find any meaningful long-term benefits compared to placebo groups are particularly distressing."
“Dr. Venkman, we believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You, however, seem to regard science as some kind of dodge or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable; you are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman. And you have no place in this department or in this university.”
> It revealed that Ariely had a longstanding relationship with Epstein, including having visited him at his New York home on several occasions.[45] One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him
I mean, I've always consigned 100% of NYT self help slop to the bin of books for people who aren't smart but desperately want to seem like they but this is just a little much now, Dan
Ah yes also the author of “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty”. The most amazing thing is he is still a professor at Duke. Wonder if he focused much on academic dishonesty in his book…
Institutions like Duke benefit enormously from having people like this around. They can claim they have lots of highly cited and well published researchers, a bit of controversy is free publicity, etc. They make money off him and so they defend him. It helps support the myth that they are good educational institutions. US private universities are grift mills.
This happens at any scale. Manager picks a bad candidate to join the team? Well now they are responsible for the decision. Their worth is tied to their bad decision and they will defend the bad choice to the detriment others on the team. So it’s an element of Duke also defending their honor since they invited and supposedly vetted him.
I mean being a known fraudster, requesting money from Epstein, and asking about some girl he met through Epstein is context too which is not a good look.
He may be innocent, but he certainly has a large stain and stink about him.
This. Significant portions of the Epstein files are random noise. Though even for a popularish author it'd be strange to be in enough 1990-2018 news snippets to reach that many EF hits. In any case "is in the Epstein files" should in general be replaced with "is in the Epstein files, including this email to/from them I found"
The most interesting section from the large paragraph on Wikipedia: “One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him”
That still doesn't mean anything. Sure we know Epstein did evil, but not everything he did was evil. One should assume at least a few people he interacted with had no reason to suspect his evil actions.
I guess that's why the same passage says Ariely maintained the relationship long after the Epstein's pedophile convictions. Not definitive either, but pretty suggestive.
Go read it yourself. There isn't enough information to draw concussions. Everything is consistent with contact with a major funder who you can't cut off just because of evil in a part of life you knew nothing about.
You can read the article with a bias and ignore his counter claims. However that is drawing a conclusion not warranted.
Now perhaps someone has read the letters and seen other evidence and can draw conclusions. However at this point I can't say who knew what.
Both people are of course evil, but they may or may not have an evil in common.
Asking THE sex trafficker pimp extraordinaire about the contact data of a “redhead”… I guess you CAN read this whole interaction as benevolent if you squint hard enough to the point that the nature of this guy’s transactions with people becomes invisible
I have a policy of "innocent until proven guilty". (even proven guilty doesn't mean guilty, but by that time so much evidence has been examined that odds are high enough to finally say guilty). All too often somebody pushes only evidence that supports their bias without full care for the full truth.
I agree it looks pretty bad, but I have not seen all the evidence and thus I must hold out the possibility he is innocent until someone does take the time to examine it all. That doesn't mean I think he is innocent, just that I'm carefully withholding judgement because I know I do not have all the facts. It also doesn't mean I'm against investigation of the facts - I just want the investigation done properly, and all discussions like this do not contribute to a proper investigation.
That’s fair. I just fear the justice system or whatever it should be to decide what the “truth” is might not be up to the task or not that interested in truth anymore. Like for example there’s this one person that everybody in the world knows who bragged about doing despicable things and there’s dozens of women who for years have been accusing him of doing similarly despicable or worse things to them, but it doesn’t matter because he’s innocent until proven guilty… So at some point I just allow myself to draw my own conclusions
> The messages revealed that his friendship with Epstein lasted for nine years, including well after Epstein was initially charged with soliciting sex from a minor.[52] Ariely also suggested that Epstein use learnings from his research to help rehabilitate his public image
what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker
anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history
>what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker
>anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history
It's possible to denounce someone, but still push back on false claims. Otherwise you're just condoning misinformation just because it aligns with your beliefs . eg.
"Did you know Donald Trump literally eats babies?"
"Wtf are you talking about? There's no evidence of that."
"Wow, I can't believe you're defending a convicted felon, sex offender, and authoritarian! Anyone who's trying to rehab his image should be consigned to the dustbin of history."
sure, that's a great principle but is it applicable here? Ariely is noted having sent an email asking Epstein about 'that redhead' (along with hundreds of others and his work rehabbing the image of someone with a known pedophilia sex trafficking indictment)
if you assess the original claim against the facts, is it as ludicrously out-of-step as someone claiming that Trump found A Modest Proposal persuasive?
To be clear: the implied answer is "pedophiles". Pedophiles benefit the most from "being mentioned" == pedophile
Because obviously, there are many people mentioned in different contexts and it is unclear how many of them are pedophiles.
There are people who may disagree, but I'm from the generation who considers molesting children a serious crime--much much more serious than being mentioned in some email.
If they were real then muddying the water by implicating as much people as possible benefits witches because it creates the impression witches are not that bad, not so evil, no need to burn each and everyone of them at the stake to immediately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely
It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with his research.