[HN Gopher] A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
___________________________________________________________________
A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Author : MrBuddyCasino
Score : 109 points
Date : 2025-03-09 05:04 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| teddyh wrote:
| The_Secret_Ingredient_Is_Crime.gif
| trilbyglens wrote:
| And similarly, corruption is a viable system of government.For a
| while...
| username332211 wrote:
| It's not even that bad of a system. The Roman Republic
| conquered the civilized world with a political system based on
| formalized clientelism.
|
| And anyone who's seen "honest" public procurement will see the
| benefit to a system where the governor can call his friend and
| have a railway built by the end of the year.
| jmward01 wrote:
| There is always a push to do original research. Maybe a partial
| solution here is that it is encouraged, even required, to take up
| a major and a minor specialty. The major one you do original
| research and the minor one you work to reproduce existing
| research. Building that in from the start would go a long way of
| creating a culture of trust but verify in these fields.
| pjdesno wrote:
| Seems like wishful thinking, much like saying engineers at
| Amazon can do whatever they want despite what Bezos says. Yes,
| they _can_ , but they'd get fired. And yes, incentives _could_
| be changed, but they won 't, because the person running the
| organization doesn't want to.
|
| Research funding and research institutions are existing things,
| that operate in specific ways. One can lobby to change this,
| but unless you want to go back to the "gentleman scientist"
| model of the 1700s and 1800s, and a scientific establishment
| about 1% the size of the one today, you can't just buck the
| system.
| NanoYohaneTSU wrote:
| Fraud is basically the only career path in our current fake
| economy. Everyone is committing fraud on some form or another.
| Your company, you personally, your government, etc.
| asimpletune wrote:
| As sensationalist as this sounds I agree. I think a major
| turning point was when tech became a big business by charging
| nothing.
|
| 1. It's impossible to compete with free so business that do add
| real value are at a disadvantage
|
| 2. A future where tech adoption slowly was accepted and people
| eased into being comfortable actually paying for things the
| value never happened and now feels impossible, as free is
| expected.
|
| 3. It's created bad incentives. Like keeping people on their
| devices as much as possible and only show them things that
| enrage them or confirm their prejudices.
|
| 4. None of it is really free because someone pays for it all
| and those costs are born by society anyways, while having less
| choice.
|
| 5. I think over time this ethos has become mainstream and it's
| essentially a fraud mindset. Nothing matters as long as the
| line goes up.
|
| (This process and the end results are surprisingly similar to
| academic fraud. "Everything is free" is the same thing as
| inventing whatever results people want to hear. Both will
| ultimately lead to the same, unsustainable end result, as
| people will no longer trust research because everything is
| fake.)
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| World leaders are casually scamming people for millions and
| nobody is batting an eye.
|
| Society has at large approved of fraud. I'm not being a lone
| holdout.
| Apreche wrote:
| Even though I have very high moral standards and refuse to work
| at shady places, almost every place I have ever worked, and
| places people I know have worked, have committed some kind of
| fraud. I don't know if they all met the legal definition of
| fraud, but they are all fraud in my book.
|
| I've seen fudging analytics and subscriber numbers to lie to ad
| buyers. I've seen people intentionally hold items over from one
| quarter to the next for accounting purposes. I've seen events
| use dubious counting methods to inflate their attendance
| figures. I've even heard stories about hospitals moving
| patients from failed surgeries back to their floor before they
| die in order to fudge the surgery survival stats.
|
| A lot of this is Goodhart's law in action. But also, when these
| very tiny frauds go unchecked in a competitive marketplace,
| everyone becomes forced to do them. If law enforcement won't
| punish them for being evil, the market will punish them for
| being good.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Bingo. This is why in the latest writers guild / SAG strike,
| the studios would not budge on transparency for streaming
| residuals. They've lied too much to let the true numbers of
| streams for their content be seen.
| RachelF wrote:
| It's ironic that one of Gino's partners in crime, Dan Ariely,
| has been writing bestselling pop-sci books about dishonesty,
| based on his own faked data.
| dash2 wrote:
| As ever I think the bigger problem is grey areas, fooling
| oneself, etc rather than outright fraud. If you really are self-
| interested and greedy, you'll probably choose another career than
| academia.
| ttoinou wrote:
| * You could be self interested & greedy and like to see
| yourself as a famous researcher
|
| * Some researchers make good money
|
| * You could start honest, then realize cheating is the only
| good way forward given the incentives
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Regarding 'cad-bloggers from Columbia:
|
| Woit does do a bit of grey area coverage. Likewise, his
| academic pubs are more interesting to me, personally! His
| reputation, however, is mixed at best. A real hero!
|
| Gelman: maybe he's trying to subdue the neuroticism*. I look
| forward to more compassionate, less overtly "curiosity"-driven
| grey-area coverage (not to mention stats papers) from him!
|
| Here is recent one, sadly also about psychologists (would be
| more interesting to do it to card carrying statisticians)
|
| http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/healing3...
|
| *Not many people describe themselves as an exponent of radical
| self-honesty since radicality isn't a palatable, much less
| enjoyable, thing. It takes a real saint (or logician) not to
| reflexively flinch from the imagined tsunami of incoming pity.
|
| Grey areas-- you can safely explore
| n2d4 wrote:
| Eh, very few fraudsters start with a plan to commit fraud. More
| often than not, it's legitimate intent, but then thoughts
| happen along the lines of "I could make my ten years of work
| much more effective by just being a tiny little bit dishonest!"
| And then it becomes, "but now I have to lie about this other
| slightly bigger thing too, else it will become suspicious!" And
| eventually, "now that I've already lied so much, I might just
| make stuff up."
|
| Particularly in research, where you may be working on the same
| idea for decades, it can be damning when you realize that the
| idea might just be fruitless. If all you had to do was remove
| one or two zeroes, and finally your colleagues would praise
| instead of mock you, wouldn't that be great?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I clicked on the article hoping it's about economic fraud. /s
|
| Alas, fraud was always a viable path. The phrase "fake it till
| you make it" wasn't coined without reason.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I always understood and used that idiom a little differently. I
| think of it as more about appearances vs internals --- e.g.
| imposter syndrome and the time it takes to develop skills
| fully. Nobody knows what they are doing on their first day a
| new job, but they have the title already.
| qwe----3 wrote:
| Columbia is a bad school (barnard college being even worse).
| kittikitti wrote:
| This article is ironic given the expulsion of many students who
| expressed support for Palestine. The article goes into why a
| student's dissertation needed another defense meanwhile they
| are arresting and banning students en masse.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Changing some details form obvious reasons: a friend was a
| postdoc in biology at a top tier UK university. Her boss was a
| hotshot professor, tons of revolutionary publications under his
| belt.
|
| Her first job when he hired her was to hammer into shape a paper
| one of his PhD students was writing. Normal stuff, right? Adding
| literature, polishing off rough edges etc. Except the PhD student
| seemed really uneasy about the paper, kept talking about issues
| with the data that needed fixing. At face value, all was great -
| nice small p-values, great effect sizes etc. Eventually it
| transpired the PhD student was doctoring the data (these were the
| issues), was deeply uncomfortable with it, but also understood
| this is what my friend will be helping her with.
|
| At this point my friend goes to the professor to inform him,
| nicely but firmly, of academic fraud. The prof comes down on my
| friend like a ton of bricks: who do you think you are, what do
| you know, I am the hotshot superstar and you are a no-name. All
| is well with the research and if you press on with the ridiculous
| accusations, she will be ruined in academia.
|
| Well, my friend is a feisty one. She complained of bullying to
| the university, as an employment thing. The university was
| desperate not to touch it and in fact encouraged her to lie low,
| but she wouldn't. The whole thing kept escalating in really nasty
| ways, but eventually wound its way to an employment tribunal.
| Notably, at this point this isn't even about the academic
| misconduct, it's about the professor bullying his employee.
|
| At the eleventh hour, the prof quits his job and goes to another,
| also top tier university. Since he is no longer my friend's boss,
| the case is dropped - no boss, no case. Still, however, no
| academic misconduct case! My friend, against all advice, wrote a
| letter to the new university, informing them verbatim of her
| findings. No response, to this day. The guy is still a top honcho
| there.
|
| Whereas my friend finished her postdoc, didn't get another
| academic position and got an industry job, where frankly, she
| seems happier.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| The very last line of your story is why the "Market for Lemons"
| paper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)
| remains so powerful.
|
| If fraudsters cannot be found or punished, it is logical to
| assume that everyone in the field is a fraud.
| mettamage wrote:
| Take this comment as an extra upvote. The thing is: we need to
| figure out a way to make accountability to become more of a
| thing. Peer review isn't enough (clearly). I suspect that
| people should create a journal that has more strict
| requirements than simply peer review. I think for many forms of
| science, one should provide an R script with the data they used
| to get the results. Yes, there are still ways to fabricate
| stuff but it'll be more transparent. Another thing is: there
| needs to be an incentive for reproducible findings
|
| Unfortunately, I don't know how to go about this
| lazide wrote:
| The issue is, who is going to prefer that paper over the
| existing ones?
|
| You'll have higher costs, and will you have higher returns?
| snackbroken wrote:
| The people providing science funding ought to be interested
| in their money being spent on science. If the methods of a
| study are not described in sufficient detail as to enable
| replication, the study is simply not science. Of course,
| doing science requires more diligence than doing
| pseudoscience. That's kind of the point.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Honestly? Peer-review sucks and I'm not convinced it's all
| fine and good with it neither
|
| Public review is better (but also worse in important ways)
|
| A possible improvement would be for reviews to be semi-public
| but (author) anonymous, also where the reviewers would have
| some choice in selecting papers
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| Maybe your friend could reach out to people like Elisabeth Bik,
| who blogs here:
|
| https://scienceintegritydigest.com/
|
| Alternatively, maybe the people behind the Data Colada blog can
| help:
|
| https://datacolada.org/
| fulafel wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/after-honesty-resear...
|
| https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24107889/francesca-gino-l...
| "In response, Gino -- who has maintained her innocence -- sued
| Harvard and the bloggers who first published the allegations,
| claiming she'd been defamed. "
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Thankfully it appears the judge tossed out her lawsuit.
| irrational wrote:
| > The incentives to investigate and call out fraud are non-
| existent. In fact, the opposite is true: If you find something
| fishy in a paper, your mentor, colleagues, and friends will most
| likely suggest that you keep quiet and move on (or as I have
| learned the hard way, they might even try to bully you into
| silence).
|
| I can't help but wonder if these mentors are also guilty of
| fabricating data and don't want to cause issues that might lead
| to people looking at their own work more closely.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Interpersonal connections can matter more than results for
| one's career. Spotting an influencer's error risks closing
| important doors.
| OfCounsel wrote:
| Looking too closely has zero upside and plenty of downside.
|
| If you're wrong and the result was legitimate, you've
| developed a reputation as a pain in the ass.
|
| If you're right, the researcher will say it was an honest
| mistake (maybe a clerical error) to absolve themselves modulo
| retraction, which happens all the time. Nothing of
| significance comes of it, but an "influencer" may well have
| other, above board, programs of research on which you could
| have collaborated and made a real name for yourselves.
| roenxi wrote:
| And the awkwardness that if said influencer is engaged in
| fraud then that means they have more free time, incentive and
| natural inclination to politic. They don't have the handicap
| of having to spend time worrying about solid research and
| they clearly care a lot about managing what other people
| think of them.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I mean, have you ever seen things work out for a whistleblower?
|
| At best, they get some 15 minutes of praise. At worst, straight
| to jail.
|
| I don't work anywhere near academia. I still wouldn't blow the
| whistle or advise others to do so.
| watwut wrote:
| Academic whistle-blower won't go to jail. Government ones do
| and big companies ones do.
| fastball wrote:
| Which company whistle-blower has gone to jail?
| dmurray wrote:
| The Libor bankers, for example [0].
|
| Were they completely innocent? Nobody is completely
| innocent, Cardinal Richelieu knew that. But they were
| definitely whistleblowers who went to jail.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60561679
| otherme123 wrote:
| Your career is done. Academics tend to rule themselves:
| think peer review, but for everything. You apply for a
| grant, and you are in bad terms with the reviewers for some
| critics? You get nothing. The editors of the Journals are
| also scientists. Are you in bad terms with a friend of the
| editor? "Nice work, but it doesn't fit our journal", also
| let me send some emails to get sure you don't get published
| in first decile, or your paper gets slowed down for months.
|
| You deserve the Nobel prize, but you critisized the work of
| someone? You get nothing! Swedish chemist Arrhenius blocked
| the Nobel price for Mendeleev because the later make some
| valid scientific critics the former didn't like.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm not sure if Elisabeth Bik is exactly a whistleblower but
| she's doing ok
| https://www.technologynetworks.com/biopharma/news/theres-
| fra...
|
| >Bik's venture into scientific sleuthing began as a hobby
| when she detected duplicated western blot images in a PhD
| thesis.
|
| Now full time.
| jakobnissen wrote:
| There is no way that's true in my research group. We would -
| and do - call each other out on our mistakes at ever group
| meeting. Straight up fraud would not be tolerated.
|
| I think people are underestimatig the psychological impact of
| failing to act on fraud in your research. Once you've learned
| that you're a fraud and what you're doing is bullshit, it would
| be soul crushing to go to work every day.
|
| I have a feeling that non-academics on the Internet have an
| overly bleak view of the ethics in acamedia. I don't know why,
| but several online influencers really like to peddle the idea
| that we're all corrupt.
| nkurz wrote:
| Upvoted for the optimism. And I presume it's just a typo, but
| "acamedia" is wonderfully evocative for cases where academic
| papers are to be written primarily to provide a foundation
| for future popularization and commercial use.
| o11c wrote:
| Hm, it looks like the Greek etymology is disputed (it was
| named after a place rather than with purpose).
|
| ake = silent
|
| heka ... in borrowing normally means "one hundred", but in
| Greek it's actually "he" (one) + "katon" (hundred), so
| "heka" doesn't mean anything. (eka- in chemistry is
| Sanskrit and unrelated)
|
| demos = district
|
| medius = middle in Latin; the Greek is mesos, which seems
| to maintain more of the explicit "between/among" sense (for
| which Latin has "inter")
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I can't help but wonder if these mentors are also guilty of
| fabricating data and don't want to cause issues that might lead
| to people looking at their own work more closely.
|
| It's far more likely that they know whistleblowing creates far
| more pain than many people expect.
|
| People who build their reputations on top of lies tend to lash
| out when threatened. They know they can't afford to have their
| lies revealed, so they launch an all-out offensive to
| discredit, bully, and push out their accusers.
|
| I've seen it play out in the workplace a couple times now. Some
| people get downright vicious when they feel their reputation is
| at risk. I watched someone spend years trying to get another
| person fired simply because that person accidentally uncovered
| one of his lies. The person who discovered it wasn't even
| trying to do anything with the information, but the person who
| lied about it was so anxious about the fact that somebody knew
| that he started doing increasingly irrational and desperate
| things to push the other person out.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Example on a smaller scale - I remember how at uni people who did
| none of the work could end up with better grades. I remember
| toiling weeks on a hard "group" project alone, and then my
| groupmates who contributed nothing got better grades - because
| from project we all got the same one, and from exams I got worse
| ones as I had no time to study well.
| 42lux wrote:
| Always has been.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Wasn't science supposed to be a set of tools for avoiding lying
| to yourself about reality, on individual level and as a
| community?
|
| What's missing from the toolbox?
| mettamage wrote:
| Science still works if the newly found knowledge can somehow be
| transformed into technology. Technology is perhaps the
| strongest form of reproducibility there is. This is true for
| even social science as it will make its way into novel
| marketing approaches that clearly generate more revenue
| scotty79 wrote:
| Same could be said about pre-scientific ideas. It's a bit of
| a copout to judge science by such a low bar.
| lazide wrote:
| The Scientific method exists because of fraud, confusion, and
| other issues.
|
| Like any set of tools, it has to be actually applied. There is
| a long and storied history of scientific advances and
| discoveries being fraudulent, because there are many incentives
| for fraud - or just plain delusion. Delulu is the solulu has
| always been tempting.
|
| There is nothing missing from the toolbox here. It just has to
| be applied.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Funding, probably.
| vacuity wrote:
| In a few words, human nature wasn't built for rational thought
| all the time.
| d--b wrote:
| Not only academic.
|
| Look at the 2008 crisis. Only one banker went to jail.
|
| Look at Binance's Zhao.
|
| Look at - ahem - Trump.
| bboreham wrote:
| Here's six jailed bankers named in two stories:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68595204
|
| https://www.cityam.com/former-barclays-trader-jay-merchant-j...
| d--b wrote:
| This is related to the libor rigging case, not the 2008
| financial crisis.
|
| Thankfully in some cases, people do actually go to jail.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Maybe for the top 1 or 10% folks out there who are good enough at
| fraud to actually reliably get away with it. For the rest of us,
| I don't think this is true.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Maybe science should be anonymous? Somehow?
|
| Or maybe we are gonna be saved by more and more of science
| getting depersonalized by the virtue of being created by AI?
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| The New Yorker article from 2023 about this saga is worth a read:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-d...
|
| Technical details of the fraud can be found in four famous-ish
| blog posts of the Data Colada group, also from 2023, beginning
| with:
|
| https://datacolada.org/109
| scotty79 wrote:
| Maybe we should modernize the publishing system for information
| age. So papers are no longer published in a sense of permanent
| fixed event but rather tentatively put up online, from where they
| can be taken down at any point autonomusly by third parties, if
| they can't be replicated, without any say of the original
| "publisher".
|
| Realying on potentially fraudulent originator that put up the
| thing to take it down is apparently too much.
| Yoric wrote:
| Friend of mine was working in cryptography. His PhD topic was
| about proving that a cryptographic scheme was secure (for some
| definition). It took him two months to break the scheme. Sadly,
| said scheme was key to the funding of his PhD advisor, so the
| advisor tried to prevent him from publishing findings.
|
| Things end mostly well, with my friend publishing, then
| restarting his PhD with a different advisor, then leaving
| academia entirely.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| So it didn't end well. Your friend had no career in academia
| because he criticized his master's work
| Yoric wrote:
| He seems happy with his current work, so I'd say it ends well
| for him.
|
| Academia did lose one (more) brilliant researcher, though, so
| it doesn't end well for academia.
| cainxinth wrote:
| Humans are much, much better at lying than detecting lies. Hence,
| fraud is a universal problem.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Not in academia-- I'm curious but not invested.
|
| > "I formed the opinion that I shouldn't use this paper as a
| building block in my research. [...] However, my advisor had a
| different view..."
|
| > "...scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a
| dissertation..."
|
| Are these dissertation catechism?
|
| Or clash of personalities?
| npvrite wrote:
| I think we all realize this is true since a current cult leader
| is president. With three letters scripting his act.
|
| Fraud.
| pjdesno wrote:
| Perhaps relevant to a lot of HN readers - the culture of
| conference publishing in much of CS (I'm in computer systems
| myself) seems to result in significantly different dynamics.
|
| Journal papers are single-blind, i.e. the reviewers know the
| names of the authors and can make decisions based on reputation,
| so if you publish great (e.g. faked) results once, it becomes
| progressively easier to do it again.
|
| Reviewing for conference papers is typically double-blind - we
| don't know the identity of the authors, and although we can try
| to guess, a couple of studies show we're wrong most of the time.
| Most papers (65-85% at good conferences) get rejected, so it's
| easy to flush something that looks fishy. (then again, it's hard
| to tell the difference between someone playing games with their
| numbers and someone who just has the typical crappy CS systems
| understanding of statistics) The addition of artifact evaluation
| to a lot of conferences provides another avenue to flush out
| faked results, too.
|
| However conference reviewing _is_ vulnerable to reviewing fraud,
| since reviewers and authors typically come from the same
| relatively small community - see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459978, or just google for
| the words "computer science reviewing cabal".
|
| Reviewing fraud might not be quite as destructive in the long
| term, as the papers that get published through such fraud are
| probably more crappy than faked, and will hopefully not get
| cited. In addition, when reviewing fraud is uncovered it's much
| more of an open-and-shut case - a single person can fake data and
| make it look a lot like good data, but review fraud requires
| communication between people who are explicitly barred from
| communicating on that topic.
|
| A lot of it depends on the community, and the size of the
| community. When you have 1000+ reviewers for a conference things
| will always get out of hand - I know of someone who got his cat
| registered as a reviewer for a particular SIG conference that he
| hated, just to make a point. I assume one could get a lot of
| fraudulent research published in that particular conference.
| raphman wrote:
| Sometimes, even a whole conference gets compromised, see e.g.
| ICIMTECH '21 [1]:
|
| "NOTICE OF RETRACTION: While investigating potential
| publication-related misconduct in connection with the ICIMTech
| 2021 Conference Proceedings, serious concerns were raised that
| cast doubt on the integrity of the peer-review process and all
| papers published in the Proceedings of this Conference. The
| integrity of the entire Conference has been called into
| question. As a result, of its investigation, ACM has decided to
| retract the Entire Conference Proceedings and all related
| papers from the ACM Digital Library.
|
| None of the papers from this Proceeding should be cited in the
| literature because of the questionable integrity of the peer
| review process for this Conference."
|
| [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3465631
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm so glad that Zoe Ziani essentially has the last word on this
| subject.
|
| For what it's worth, while I'm sure that her advisors are known
| within that research community, I believe they deserve to be
| named and shamed. Their behavior, IMO, is almost as bad as the
| original fraud to begin with. It was classic "circling the
| wagons" bullying, and their scientific reputations absolutely
| deserve the hit that their atrocious behavior warrants.
|
| I want to emphasize that this isn't about "retribution" or
| getting back at these people, it's about publicizing that their
| behavior was _wrong_ , the antithesis of what scientific inquiry
| is about, and was fundamentally rooted in a cowardice that put
| professional standing on a higher pedestal than scientific
| integrity. Actions have consequences, and these advisors should
| face consequences for their abhorrent actions.
| kittikitti wrote:
| "enuf"
|
| I don't think this is incorrect but it's definitely a grey area
| to spell it this way. It would be ironic to be downvoted for
| pointing it out based on the intent of the article.
| bonzini wrote:
| Better link (the actual post mortem):
| https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/
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