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Harvard’s ‘Leading Scholar’ on ‘Honesty’ Caught Fabricating ‘Multiple Studies’
Harvard’s “leading scholar” on behavioral psychology has been caught fabricating “multiple studies,” including the findings in a famous major study on “honesty.”
“Reverberations” are going through the academic community after evidence emerged showing that Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School fabricated results in “multiple studies,” according to a report from the New York Times.
The report asserts that the field of behavioral science, an area of research often seen with much “skepticism” from other scientists, “may have sustained its most serious blow yet” over the revelations about Gino’s studies.
One of these was a famous study on honesty conducted in 2012.
The results of the study have “been cited hundreds of times by other scholars” since. ...
It's over my head, but I can tell you, there's a LOT of problems with the Big Bang theory. Current models are incorrect, for certain, maybe they just have to be tweaked, but maybe, they are fundamentally wrong, and that's where the evidence is increasingly pointing to.
Frankly I think quantum theory is bunk.
As for the big bang, if you start with the premise that the universe is expanding and run it backwards as matter and space get compressed towads a singularity, the laws of physics as we understand them break down.
First many universal "constants" probably are not in reality constant but perceived as such given the space and time we exist in.
Second if space time is a fabric that can be stretched then it can also "bunch up" which would explain things such as the Plank length. There is only so much you can compress matter before the current physical model of the universe breaks down.
I wish I were better at math... but much beyond special relativity gets beyond me. I've seen the Schrodinger Wave equation and understand what it represents conceptually but I don't have the math chops to properly apply it in any meaningful way.
The hyphenated PRESIDENT of one of the most respected research giants in the country, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, announced his resignation effective August 1st, after a panel reviewing several of his peer-reviewed scientific papers found the top scientist had manipulated or falsified data to get the results he was looking for.
Even worse, the review panel found that questions about Marc’s made-up research cropped up as early as 2001, and then again in the early 2010s, in 2015 and 2016, and in March 2021, but nobody ever took any action, and the fake scientist wound up running one of the top scientific research institutions in the world.
I know it seems weird, but that’s Science!
The panel’s report concluded that the falsification of study results under Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s control “spanned labs at three separate institutions.” It identified a lab culture where Tessier-Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ — who could generate favorable results — and punish the ‘losers,’” the honest students who were unable or struggled to generate “helpful” data for him. ...
You could say that the system worked; Marc was forced to resign from his institutional position. But if it weren’t for the dogged work of the Stanford Daily, which relentlessly pounded away at the story for years, Marc would be happily running one of the most influential research institutions in the world.
Marc got away with his fake studies for over 20 years. How many other bad studies have promoted fakers into management of leading institutions?
The Stanford Daily is run by students! Students accomplished this.
The Chronicle of Higher Education published a thoughtful essay this week titled, “We Need Scientific Dissidents Now More Than Ever.” The sub-headline added, “The early artificial consensus around Covid’s origins is a wake-up call.”
We seem to be living in two worlds. Also this week, USA Today published a scathing diatribe against pandemic-era covid and jab misinformation on social media, headlined “Among those spreading medical misinformation during the pandemic: 52 doctors.”
So which is it? Do we need scientific dissidents now more than ever? Or do we need to put a cap in those 52 heterodox doctors?
USA Today’s article was reporting on a new “study” posted on the JAMA Open Network, titled “Communication of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media by Physicians in the US.” They defined misinformation as anything varying from CDC pandemic-era guidance.
Because slavish, unthinking adherence to vacillating, politically-driven government propaganda is just what we want in a healthcare system.
The researchers, if you can call them that, “found” that a core group of 52 doctors were responsible for “most” of the non-CDC-approved misinformation. The major themes they identified included: (1) disputing jab safety and effectiveness, (2) promoting “medical treatments” without “scientific evidence” or FDA approval (i.e., ivermectin), (3) disputing that masks can prevent catching covid, and (4) an “catchall” category including things like “unsubstantiated claims virus origin, government lies, and other conspiracy theories.”
In their conclusion, the study’s authors recommended considering taking legal and professional action against these devilish misinformation superspreaders, to teach them a lesson and make sure only government-approved scientific information gets to the public. Legal and professional action against the doctors is, of course, already well underway, mooting their big point.
May they find themselves on the other side of the censorship microscope at some point. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
In contrast, the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education seemed to be making the exact opposite point. It began by telling the shameful story of heroic Vienna medical resident Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 famously ran a test in the charitable childcare clinic where he worked, by asking doctors to wash their hands before working with patients. Patient deaths immediately fell by 90 percent.
In other words, Semmelweis was the guy who figured out hand washing. It was a big deal.
For that remarkable discovery, Mr. Semmelweis was made a doctor, promoted to the Academy of Sciences, and awarded the 1847 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Haha, just kidding! Actually, Semmelweis was ridiculed by the doctors, fired from his Vienna hospital, made a pariah and professionally unemployable, and driven out of Vienna entirely, persona non grata. He died broke in Hungary, in a psychiatric hospital, after suffering a severe beating by asylum guards.
I’m not sure if it would have been any comfort to him, but Mr. Semmelweis’ experience minted a term, the “Semmelweis reflex.” The article quoted intellectual and author Timothy Leary’s definition: the Semmelweis reflex is “mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished.”
USA Today’s researchers seem to be quite familiar with the Semmelweis reflex, just not in a good way.
The article continued by describing the revolting story of how during the 1960’s and 70’s, the scientific community identified fat — and not sugar, the real culprit — as the cause of plummeting American cardiac health. Since it turns out that it was a sugar lobbying group that single-handedly pulled off the coup, establishing incorrect scientific consensus as dogma for decades, harming who knows how many Americans, the Chronicle’s article observed:
Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view. When a scientific consensus emerges via this accelerated process, the role of the scientific dissident is not, like Semmelweis, to carry out revolutionary science. The dissident’s role is to provide a check against epistemically detrimental and artificial consensus formation. Nevertheless, the challenges faced are similar. Never has this accelerated process unfolded with such success, and such fury, as in the case of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In its final paragraph, the Chronicle’s article landed on a vastly important point, a point the USA Today study researchers should be strongly encouraged to ponder. Here’s how the Chronicle put it:
The world isn’t simple, what the evidence shows isn’t always clear, and things are not always as they seem. So we owe the Semmelweisses of the world a debt of gratitude — for their diligence and their courage. This doesn’t mean we should believe every heterodox thinker that comes along. But it means we should strongly resist the urge to punish them, to censor them, to call them racist, and to evaluate their claims by, in Stewart’s words, “litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances.”
In other words, heterodox thinkers are an essential and necessary part of the scientific process. They serve as a check on consensus thinking, forcing the consensus to justify and prove their preferred hypothesis and not just sit around in an echo chamber of contented mutual agreement. Heterodox scientists also check government overreach — and how much better off would we have been, had there been more than only 52 such thinkers during the pandemic?
In other words, instead of running pseudo-scientific studies and USA Today articles condemning them, we should be thanking those 52 heterodox doctors.
Finally, the two groups of scholars — The Chronicle’s editors and the study researchers — evidence the battle lines between the establishment (CDC is gospel) brownshirts and the anti-establishment (heterodox thinking is good) counter-revolutionaries.
‘By virtue of not having acquired a certain set of letters after my name, there are certain areas of the world that are closed off to me. And I must therefore be obedient, not just to the scientists themselves, but to the power structure which they inform.’ ...
Once, the culture of Western Civilisation had at its core a form of wisdom that was transcendent of specialisation and capable of sifting and synthesising between the diagnostics and prescriptions of multiple disciplines. Now, more than three centuries after the dawning of the Enlightenment, we find ourselves at the mercy of a multiplicity of myopic specialisms, each of which may command the power and authority of the state in mandating its findings and pronouncements. ...
‘One of the things that is quite staggering about this culture is that there is a shadowing of knowledge. All knowledge is veiled, because it is the prerogative and the property of particular experts, and they alone have the entitlement to explain it. It really is a going back to the darkest days. The churches were once accused of obscurantism in relation to science. Well, this is a similar situation — far worse, I would say — because it’s happening at a far more basic level, so that people no longer consider themselves qualified to speak about anything in relation to certain areas and those areas are expanding exponentially all the time, as they’re being colonised by these new experts.
Before we start, let’s check in on the evolution of the mandatory pro-vaccine statement required for a study to survive peer-review. Spoiler: it’s getting watered down. Here’s how this peer-reviewed study phrased the obligatory endorsement:
The SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccines have been found to be safe in international studies involving hundreds of thousands of individuals (1–4), although very rare cases of adverse events have been subsequently reported.
One imagines with relish the twenty-one authors debating the precise wording of that sentence at great length. And, haha! First, they completely dropped the word “effective.” Sayonara! And even the word “safe” has been diluted; rather than just saying jabs are safe, as if it were common knowledge, these authors merely noted that “international studies” found the jabs to be safe.
In other words, they said it was safe. Don’t blame us.
All of these papers are held up, waved frenetically in our faces by hersterics and rulers who chant “Research shows we must trust The Science!”
End it. Formal publishing is not just useless, it’s downright harmful. And there is no need of it.
Science began with highly intelligent men writing letters to each other, and showing the copies around. A fine practice.
It kept the noise to a minimum. Formal publishing is now almost entirely noise. There are more than 8 million papers published a year now, a number going up and up and up. Nobody reads them. Why should they? They are almost all useless. Nearly all exist because, and only because, academics must publish or perish. Must.
If we eliminated formal publications, much of this persiflage would dry up, and our best and brightest would be able to concentrate on their own work, and not be harassed with “peer review” requests.
The only people who have respect for peer review are those who have never experienced it. As I always say, there is no surer enforcer of banal tepid watery content than peer review. Nothing better ensconces error and mandates Consensus. I cannot say it better than Alan Savory, who recognized peer review is academia and not science.
Nothing better ensconces error
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Alyssia Finley titled, “How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science.”
You don’t say.
The piece begins describing how last month, to his great credit, respected climate scientist and director of Berkeley’s Breakthrough Institute, Patrick Brown, publicly admitted that he’d censored one of his own studies to remove facts tending to disprove the current climate theory, so as to improve his odds of getting published.
Specifically, in an essay for the Free Press, Brown confessed that he’d left out “key aspects other than climate change” from his paper about the cause of California’s wildfires, because the omitted details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.”
Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, lied and denied that the journal has any preferred narrative. But she also didn’t invite Brown to add back the omitted data, either.
Next the op-ed cited a September 11th, 2023 paper published in the JAMA Network titled “Peer Review and Scientific Publication at a Crossroads.” The researchers described a burgeoning crisis in peer review, explaining that the ‘academic papers game’ is getting infested with all kinds of cheating, and wrote:
Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society. The number of science journal titles and articles is steadily increasing; many millions of scientists coauthor scientific papers, and perverse reward systems do not help improve the quality of this burgeoning corpus.
In addition, deceptive, rogue actors, such as predatory and pirate publishers, fake reviewers, and paper mills continue to threaten the integrity of peer review and scientific publication.
Even outright fraud may be becoming more common—or may simply be recognized and reported more frequently than before.
This op-ed isn’t the first criticism of the so-called “peer review” process, which some top scientists have long argued has become hopelessly compromised, and captured by pharma interests. The biggest problem, and threat to all our well being, a problem which became painfully obvious during the pandemic, is that government actors dangle grant money in front of unethical whitecoats to obtain fake studies supporting the officials’ preferred policy narratives. Even worse, they all conspire to prevent inconveniently-contradictory papers from ever being published in the first place.
But that’s Science! So shut up! What do you know? I bet you don’t even have a white lab coat.
"Kayfabe," a concept from professional wrestling where staged events are presented as real, offers a lens to understand how societal systems, from economics to politics, have similarly evolved to blend reality with orchestrated deception, challenging our ability to discern truth. ...
"You spat directly in my face and told me not only that it was raining but that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face." ...
"You cannot trust Harvard or Nature... the CDC or the NIH." ...
"You've got people running around who are calling themselves scholars who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats, and you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong." ...
“Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated.”
It’s amazing that someone can have this level of insight in 2011 yet miss the biggest Kayfabe show when it turned up on his doorstep. I guess he was in good company with the likes of Chomsky and Klein to name just two. I’m grateful he now sounds more like a sane person again. ...
If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".
Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working".
Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. ...
Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.
At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.
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