being honest about dishonesty
it would be ironic if it were not such an obvious mode
you can’t make this stuff up:
(well, apparently, you can, then you can publish a study on it and get tenure…)
at a certain point we really need to stop being surprised at how much of the “progressive” social and even hard sciences have become utterly fraudulent.
it’s not an outlier. this is the overwhelming mode and there is a clear and obvious reason why and why such practice so often concentrates in the “progressive” subgroup.
let’s look:
meet harvard’s newly defenestrated “star professor” francesca gino, who studied, wait for it, honesty and other similar behavioral topics, and now finds herself in termination proceedings (and is fighting them) for falsifying data about, wait for it, honesty.
i mean, honestly…
Harvard did not detail the professor’s firing or tenure being stripped — citing it as a personnel matter — but told GHB that the school had not revoked a professor’s tenure in decades.
No professors have had their tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the American Association of University Professors formalized termination rules, according to The Harvard Crimson.
hilariously, her seemingly fraudulent work was about honestly pledges and purported to show that if a person signs an honesty pledge at the beginning of a self-reporting survey, it causes them to give more honest results than if they signed one at the end.
The editors are retracting this article and note that Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson ( http://datacolada.org/98 ) have provided evidence to question the validity of the data in the article.
not even my omnipresent gatospies™ have been able to determine whether she signed an honesty pledge before or after submission of the data…
her response:
fully shaggy defense
When asked about the issues with her work, Gino asserted that issues with her work may stem from errors by her or her research assistants or potential tampering by someone with “malicious intentions,” according to the university report.
“There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result,” she wrote.
“I did not falsify data to bolster any result. I did not commit the offense I am accused of. Period.”
she tried for defamation but it got dismissed.
obviously, this is sort of a funny case in the “wow, that’s ironic” milieu and all too typical, but it’s also a part of a massive pattern of abuse. we’ve seen it in 100 disciplines from reporting levelized costs on solar and wind power, global warming, covid, gender treatments, to tampering with crime statistics, defining trends into and out of existence, the list goes on and on.
stapel lied about discrimination and justice and the effects of environment on racism, lacour lied about influencers and same sex marriage, and the hilarity of the grievance study hoax papers that published literal gibberish about things like rape culture in dog parks and feminist mein kampf got uncritically enjournaled leaving the idea of “peer review” gutted.
this seems to be an endemic issue in the “woke” and progressive studies.
i think there is a reason for this that’s basically baked right into the pie: this group has never valued truth.
they value narrative.
and these two values often find themselves in diametric opposition.
sowell once posited a key differentiation betwixt “progressives” and “conservatives” that i think hangs a useful frame here:
conservatives believe that people are people and that you cannot much change their fundamental incentives, drives, and character, at least in any sort of human scale timeframe. this is why they gravitate toward ideas like “positive law:” see what people do, see if it works, and if it does, codify it. they build systems to accommodate humanity.
progressives believe that people are fungible and changeable and that the purpose of systems is to effect such change, molding humans into something new and finer. your drives and incentives and character are fluid and the “correct” leadership and structures will “fix” them, improve them, perfect them. they build systems to manipulate people and render them as some new ideal.
much of this modern rubric seems to go beyond just “people” and starts to be “the world.” there is no acceptance of limits of baseline reality, it is, in fact, roundly rejected. from the communist’s “new man” to the gender-activist’s “new woman” this creates an intellectual and functional framework that prizes “our story” over fact.
some have opined on this as follows:
where this really gets into profound trouble is when this secular religion of the perfectibility of fallen humans though hair-shirt climate contrition, marxist redistributions to the more equal of animals, and offering up their daughters to shower with men who join their swim teams mistakes itself for rationalist science, hard, social, or otherwise.
and this is ALWAYS where these movements unerringly go; it’s an unavoidable emergent property of the base presumption of “utopia, one 5 year plan from today.”
when one is sufficiently sure of narrative and unassailable in its adherence, mere “facts” become trifles, easy to ignore or explain away as “bad research” or a simple matter of “we have simply not learned how to prove our case yet.” this is how bad scientists style themselves good people.
they literally do no care what the data is or the science says.
they fudge it to help you, swell fellows all.
these are religions whose first rule is religion denial. they will oppose yours and fail to recognize their own. it’s cultists playing at scientists and always and everywhere they use a facile firmament of conjured doctrine as their bedrock fact.
communism works. men can be women. all power is structural racism.
it’s all the same category error.
such false scientific endeavors require false scientists.
the data will not support them. the economics, the biology, the physics, and the behavioral outcomes all scream “liar” at them.
so they suppress the truth and sponsor the lie.
the make up facts to justify the interventions they desire to impose.
the adherents to these disciplines are sure they are right. they do not prevaricate and defraud with guilty consciences. the soviets brought us lysenko. mao railed against relativity and ecology and then killed all the sparrows and lost his crops and suddenly, 50 million die. they were sure they were right, so sure that reality was accused of wrongness. this is the base state of those who would perfect the human character:
reality is an impediment, something to shuck off and to fix.
there’s nothing new here, it’s all the same game: we know how the world is supposed to be and even if it is not that way now, the power of our ideology and narrative must stand.
who cares if we lie about honesty oaths? we’re sure you need them. it’s for your own good. covid vaccines, lockdowns, taking away bobby to make him into becky, blank slate formative theories of indoctrination and the hobgoblins of hate speech, it’s all of a piece:
i don’t even need to look up gino’s politics. i already know just from her “science.”
that’s how you know that it has all become one thing.
this is a group that is so wedded to the world as they imagine it ought to be that they fake lynch themselves (or cheer for those who do) to score social points.
how much respect could the idea of “impartial data” garner in such a mind?
yeah.
of course the academics lie. the purpose of their work is to support a movement and a regime that are both founded on the big lies of human perfectibility and you cannot get that result from real data.
so once regimes start paying academics and agencies and the grant giver industrial complex arises, the censorship and dishonesty starts. it’s inevitable.
if you need data to show what isn’t so, this is the only way to get it. you make getting the “right” answer more important than doing real research and this selects for “story time as science.”
you make up the temperature data or the survey results and “gore’s your uncle.”
this is not a glitch in the progressive science system, it’s quite literally the organizing principle.
no one is starting from well-designed and dispassionate experiment and then seeking to extrapolate. they start from conclusions and work backwards.
i know the “marxist takeover” of universities and journals is an overused descriptor, but how else is one to explain these near perfect parallels?
the utopian claims may change a bit, but the basic underpinning is indelibly identical:
our theory is X and we will torture the data until it confesses to it.
commitment to narrative over fact will never get you science, it will suppress it.
you’re always just getting what someone paid to show you.
remember this?
of course you don’t. they memory holed it. but there was a study 20 years ago that showed that flu vaccines had no mortality benefit in seniors.
In his review of the available literature, Jefferson finds a large gap between influenza vaccination policy and what the data tell us.1 What the data tell us, he writes, is that the inactivated vaccines have little or no effect on the effects measured, and the comparative evidence is insufficient to demonstrate the vaccines are safe.
Jefferson's results are consistent with previous epidemiological reviews of the effects of influenza vaccination. A 2005 US National Institutes of Health review of over 30 influenza seasons could not correlate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group and concluded that observational studies substantially overestimate vaccination benefit.2
it was replicated all over the world.
all the experts knew.
but they told you the opposite because that’s what suited both the public health narrative and the agenda of political donors.
they may not even realize what they are doing.
half these people are probably “sure” that the flu jab works and that the “data must be wrong.”
but what’s really wrong is their mindset.
they put thumbs on scales because deep down, they do not trust data, they trust doctrine and if the data will not cooperate to make for glorious revolution, then it must be subjected to struggle sessions until it learns to think correctly and mouth the proper slogans.
these people have mired our academies, our agencies, our scientific bodies. they are birdstrike in the engines of understanding, a breakage and blockage in the road of science.
people often opine “well, it can’t ALL be fraud!” to which i respond: “why not?” why, in the face of these incentives and inclinations can it not? why would these people not lie? they have every reason to.
what would be a wonder is if they didn’t. this is just human nature. you can’t change it, only build systems to prevent it from expressing itself badly and to the detriment of others.
the irony gets thick to the point of recursion:
those who argue that human nature can be perfected with science and systems create systems of science that show that humans will always lie and cheat and prevaricate when placed in such structure, unfixed and unrepentant.
the “guys” are never “better and smarter and more moral” this time.
same sun. nothing new under it.
seen through such a lens, there is simply no case for government funded science.
there is no progress with progressives in charge.
Interestingly that CBS news report from ran the EXACT same false narratives about vaccines after it was proven they were not effective:
1. It will make the flu less severe!
2. We will vaccinate children and otherwise healthy adults to protect the 'other'
They've been rinsing and repeating these lies long before the covid scam....
They had a lot of practice.
Best take on progressive mindset and narrative I’ve read yet. I always blamed no moral backbone, but the blind stupidity of believing your own narrative with no data to back it explains a lot.