RankStranger Posted August 4, 2023 Share Posted August 4, 2023 There's an interesting news story out the past few days. Apparently a well regarded and highly successful Harvard professor (a behavioral scientist specializing in 'honesty' no less) has been caught faking her data. https://fortune.com/2023/08/02/harvard-professor-gino-dishonesty-investigation-falsified-research/ That particular story is behind a pay wall, as are most stories on this topic. If anybody is interested, I can provide some tips for getting around most paywalls. Do a Google News search on Francesca Gino and there are plenty of articles. This story reminds me of the Replication Crisis that we've seen over the past few decades- throughout the sciences, but more pronounced in areas like medical science and the 'social sciences'. I'm not bagging on the Scientific Method in a philosophical sense. But as a practical matter, we humans apparently ain't great at applying it. If we were, we wouldn't have thousands of non-replicable 'studies'... due possibly to oversights, perverse incentives in academia and industry, and the nature of the subjects being studied. Misconduct of this sort provides the anti-intellectual crowd with ammunition that they could never come up with on their own. It's just one of many ways that our society's institutions are proving corrupt and not exactly trustworthy. I'm not planning to join Q-Anon or anything, but I can see how lots of people have zero trust in our allegedly-scientific institutions. Any thoughts on this? How do you deal with clear mismanagement and uncertainty in our scientific 'knowledge'? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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