
The Mind of a Con Man (2013) - gwern
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all
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michaelkeenan
Reading this:

 _> Rumors of fraud trailed Stapel from Groningen to Tilburg, but none raised
enough suspicion to prompt investigation._

And this:

 _> The two students decided to report the charges to the department head,
Marcel Zeelenberg. But they worried that Zeelenberg, Stapel’s friend, might
come to his defense._

I'm reminded of a system to identify cases where there's widespread knowledge
or suspicion of malfeasance, but people are reluctant to come forward. The
nonprofit Sexual Health Innovations has created a system called Callisto,
where you can report sexual abuse, but have the allegation locked until
someone else has accused the same perpetrator of sexual abuse too. This is
intended to help cases where someone abuses multiple people, but each is
afraid that they won't be taken seriously because they're the only one coming
forward.

A similar system might help to spot academic fraud. Here's an article about
the system: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/college-sexual-
assa...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/college-sexual-assault-
reporting-callisto_n_6021952.html)

~~~
pstuart
Guilt escrow?

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debacle
"The Mind of a Pathological Liar" might be a better title.

This is the "science" Feynman warned about.

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tjradcliffe
> But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his
> hypothesis was valid.

The four most dangerous words are: "It just makes sense."

If it hasn't been subject to public testing by systematic observation,
controlled experiment and Bayesian inference, it doesn't matter if it makes
sense or not. It isn't knowledge.

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searine
Wow this is finally hitting the maintstream.

I've been following this case for awhile now. Retraction Watch
[http://retractionwatch.com/](http://retractionwatch.com/) has been detailing
each of the retractions of his studies.

It's been entertaining to watch the growing clusterfuck.

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noobiemcfoob
This, in some part, is due to a large failing in the scientific community,
namely the lack of reproduced studies. In the system we currently have,
already starved for money, we fail to properly reproduce the findings of
others. Most researchers are more concerned with their own findings than that
of their colleagues, and when grant money is scarce, perhaps they are right to
be.

There is a lot of bad science out there (as well as the outright fraud), but
this shouldn't be used for an argument that science should be less funded or
what have you. Instead, it should be used as valid argument to better fund and
bolster reproducibility initiatives (such as validation.scienceexchange.com
and others)

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lizard
This was an interesting read, and highly concerning for me. While I am
formally educated in computer science I enjoy psychology studies and collect
research articles about group behavior, which I use as a basis for building
simulations. For my purposes it doesn't really matter if the research failed
to account for all the variables or makes weakly supported conclusion. I'm not
trying to publish my own research, I just enjoy the reading and inspiration
for projects. But fabricated research is another matter. The data isn't just
inconclusive, the conclusion is made up. It may be reasonable, it may even be
true, but the suggestions from the article are false and so contribute to an
inaccurate model to understand the world.

How can someone like me, who enjoys the research but doesn't want to make a
career out of it, keep up with it? Where can I go to find good, to the best of
our current understanding, research (in psychology or other fields)? How can I
identify meaningful research from the fluff? What resources are available to
help me learn when or if research I read is found to be questionable or
fabricated?

Or is scientific research out of reach for the common man? If I can't find the
time to read all the citations and critically evaluate each article, am I
better off just staying away?

------
known
Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism
(egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy),
and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

~~~
elberto34
i think at some point everyone is one of those in life

~~~
tjradcliffe
So what. Not everyone fabricates data for a decade, lies to everyone around
them about matters of enormous professional import, and endangers the career
of everyone they've ever worked with, most of all their students.

The article talks about "good people doing bad things", which doesn't actually
happen. We have a name for people who do bad things: we call them "bad
people."

~~~
pavel_lishin
I thought we just called them "people".

~~~
tjradcliffe
Nope. Not everything is bad enough to be worth labelling "bad" and anyone who
thinks there is no difference between any ordinary decent person who does
their best to behave honestly, and some bottom-feeding scum like this guy is
so morally flaccid as to be an embarrassment to vertebrates everywhere.

This liar got jobs based on his lies. The people who didn't get them were not
--one would like to believe--publishing lies based on purely fabricated data.
You'd have to be pretty evil to look those people in the eye and say, "Hey,
your only problem was you were too honest! You didn't lie _enough_ to get the
job!"

Were they pure and unsullied? Of course not. But only a moral degenerate is
incapable of telling the difference between a systematic, deliberate, serial
liar like this guy and the ordinary rough and tumble of scientific life, in
which we do our best to overcome our worst tendencies, and mostly succeed.

And you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane,
drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal. You are hoping against hope that most
people most of the time aren't lying and cheating their way through life, not
faking research results or safety reports or maintenance logs. You are hoping,
in short, that most people _are not bad_. So you might have the decency to
demonstrate an awareness of that. It costs you nothing and we kind of
appreciate it.

~~~
bambax
> _you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane,
> drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal_

And that's why there are no health scandals, no planes ever crash, no cars are
ever recalled, and there are no food scandals either (including, but not
limited to, crap being passed as food, or animals being fed their own brains,
etc.)

The opposition psychologist "scientists" have shown towards any attempt to
reproduce their findings mean this guy was not an outlier, but simply an
extreme case of a general (human!) preference for story over facts.

Who's _us_ , by the way?

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coldcode
Bernie Madoff had the same mentality. You get away with a little more each day
until it's all you are. Sadly this type of story gives ammunition to those who
decry science "if this guy can lie, maybe everyone lies."

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crasshopper
I wonder why the graduate students went to Zeelenberg first, instead of
straight to Eijlander.

~~~
cpwright
It makes perfect sense that they would go to their department head. They knew
him and most likely had a reasonable relationship with him given that they
were comfortable discussing this over dinner/drinks; as opposed to a
university administrator that they had no prior relationship with.

~~~
emcrazyone
yea I was wondering that too and I think if I were in their shoes, I would
have done just that thinking that the two were in cahoots.

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basseq
Almost two years old and a dupe of 5622887.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5622887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5622887)

~~~
michaelkeenan
Nothing wrong with that. From the FAQ:

 _Q: Are reposts ok?

A: If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill
reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._ \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

