Fraud and deceit are a slippery slope
Story submitted by Bruce Webster
An article in the New York Times chronicles the descent of a sociologist into wholesale fraud. It is worth reading the whole article, because I believe it offers insight into some of the pressures, temptations, and self-rationalizations that many scientists struggle with.
Here is one key passage that will likely not surprise anyone here at WUWT (all emphasis in quoted text is mine):
Each case of research fraud that’s uncovered triggers a similar response from scientists. First disbelief, then anger, then a tendency to dismiss the perpetrator as one rotten egg in an otherwise-honest enterprise. But the scientific misconduct that has come to light in recent years suggests at the very least that the number of bad actors in science isn’t as insignificant as many would like to believe. And considered from a more cynical point of view, figures like Hwang and Hauser are not outliers so much as one end on a continuum of dishonest behaviors that extend from the cherry-picking of data to fit a chosen hypothesis — which many researchers admit is commonplace — to outright fabrication.
“Cherry-picking of data” is, of course, not an unknown topic in these parts. But here’s an even more intriguing passage:
Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.
And again:
What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.”
And finally how it all turned out:
…the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.” If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees identified several practices as “sloppy science” — misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be.
A lesson for climate science. Be sure to read the whole thing. ..bruce..
Source of story : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Rud Istvan:
Your untrue suggestions that I believe in abiogenic oil and whatever are twaddle.
Peak oil is nonsense. Search the WUWT archives to find out all the many and various reasons why it is complete bunkum according to all its definitions including yours.
For now, consider this.
Nobody bothers to look for an alternative to a resource when it is abundantly available. They don’t bother to look because an abundantly available resource is cheap to obtain in both money and effort.
If a resource begins to become scarce then it becomes expensive to obtain in both money and effort. So, people look for alternatives. The alternatives can be a new source of the resource or an alternative to the resource. And the alternatives often turn out to have advantages.
In the case of crude oil, both kinds of alternatives exist.
Technology continues to enable crude oil to be obtained from previously unavailable sources.
Synthetic crude oil (syncrude) can be made from coal or natural gas. For two decades it has been possible to obtain syncrude at economically competitive cost and price with crude by converting coal using the Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process.
There is sufficient coal to suffice for at least the next 300 years. And nobody can know if crude will be needed 300 years in the future: 300 years ago there was an immense need for hay to feed horses but not now. Peak hay was not a limit on progress.
Peak Oil is nonsense.
Richard
As a rule, journal reviewers don’t ask to see the raw data. In any field.
There will have to be a change in this practice—in psychology and in climate science at the very least.
To me, what’s scariest about Stapel is that after the Levelt committee report came out, with gory details about all the publications employing fake or doctored data, there was strong pushback from social psychologists against a chapter in the report describing widespread unscientific practices that fall short of doctoring data.
Apparently many research psychologists now believe themselves entitled to quit collecting data as soon as they have attained statistically significant results, or to swap control groups between experiments in order to get a significant difference between control and experimental groups in the experiment of interest.
PS. Psychological Science published Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac. Previously, Psych Science published two articles co-authored by Stapel, both of which reported fake data. There should be some overt soul-searching going on about the way they review and edit…
An example of Noble Cause Corruption from climate science:
“The paper I refer to as a “small private opinion poll” is of course the Zickfeld et al PNAS paper. The list of pollees in the Zickfeld paper are largely the self-same people responsible for the largely bogus analyses that I’ve criticised over recent years, and which even if they were valid then, are certainly outdated now. Interestingly, one of them stated quite openly in a meeting I attended a few years ago that he deliberately lied in these sort of elicitation exercises (i.e. exaggerating the probability of high sensitivity) in order to help motivate political action.”
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/2/1/james-annan-on-climate-sensitivity.html
Shades of Bellesales, whose phony book, Arming America, was awarded the Pulitzer prize by Big Academia, which looked down its nose at Outsider criticism on the Internet.
PS: Bellesales book was politically correct, so it “followed” that it was factually correct (to Big Academia).
I think we have to look at how research is funded. As long as there is an incentive to enhance or outright falsify research in order to keep the grant money flowing, it’ll happen. Relying solely on personal integrity is not working.
Perhaps an aggressive program of recapturing grant money in the event of fraud is needed. Once academics and universities have to repay serious money for fraudulent research, there will be much less of it. The only problem with this approach is that there will be a reliance on paperwork and procedure rather than common sense when deciding if there is or isn’t fraud (see Medicare/Medicaid fraud prosecutions – the vast majority are simple paperwork violations rather than intent to defraud).
Actually, all that’s needed is an insider whistleblower.
In fact, it’s likely the only way that such fraud will be uncovered. Viz the fraudster in Holland. It was his grad students who did him in.
AGW climate “scientists” are surrounded by the same type of insiders.
In the US, we have a law called the False Claims Act. It allows anyone with knowledge of schemes that defraud the US government of money to file a lawsuit. When the fraud is proven (using the insider’s knowledge and testimony), the whistleblower receives a large percentage of the money clawed back from the fraudsters and their home institutions.
See this article for full details on the on-going search for insiders willing to risk their reputations and careers (or make them) in Climate “Science” for the satisfaction of revealing the fraud:
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/01/04/climategate-michael-manns-very-unhappy-whistleblower-new-year/
Insiders are virtually the only way that such complex frauds are uncovered. See Enron, the Dutch professor, and Bernie Madoff.
Climategate was the first insider tipoff. If more follow, with the smoking guns from the labs themselves, the whole scam will go down in flames very quickly.
Encourage your friends to encourage their friends to share the details of the False Claims Act with all the academics they know.
“Crowd-sourcing” helped to find the Boston bombers. It can help uncover a whistleblower too.
Can you imagine how miserable your life is if you’re a lowly grad student doing all the fake number-crunching for a world-renowned “scientist?” They will earn their just desserts!
Kajaluk: The age of deceit, actually Benghazi and Boston come to mind.
I’m not sure but, Peter Gleick may be looking for help.
Is Professor Stapel will to steal as well as lie?
We know he can forge documents?
Can he navigate the internet and run a printer?
Also, Lew just got a new job. He may need help making up data.
I’ll see if I can locate their email addresses.
cn
His agreeing? (as in “your” agreement with climate scientists, e.g. in a contract or sales agreement)
Or is it that he is agreeing? (as in “you are” agreeing with climate scientists)
What did you mean? I had to stop reading at that point since what had been written was not clear.
/one man crusade to educate on the proper use of the contraction “you are” vis-a-vis “you’re”
.
This can’t possibly happen in the U.S. because everyone is involved in the con, from the grant administrators and funding agency heads on up the line. It takes a con village.
The common factor that economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology have is that they are all attempting to directly study human behavior. Like climatology, they’re dealing with a complex system, even a quasi-chaotic one with poor correlation between strength of input and and output. That is, the subject is extraordinarily difficult to study and impossible to fully systematize, let alone forecast. The divide between these fields of study is not so much between “real” and “unreal” science as between “hard” science with sane, fixed outcomes, and “difficult” science with all the simplicity of a brawl between drunks in a dark alley. In the world of academics, where publish or perish is the rule and the grants you pull in have a direct influence on your chances at tenure, making up “elegant” fictions is far easier than conducting research with ham-handed, idealistic graduate students who not only want to find the “truth” about a problem, but tend to prefer their own ideas.
The template for social engineering powered by junk science was discovered by Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. A few excerpts from a Forbes article:
“…But the fears she raised were based on gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that, if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct. Her observations about DDT have been condemned by many scientists. In the words of Professor Robert H. White-Stevens, an agriculturist and biology professor at Rutgers University, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
As he explained in “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” a stunning, point by point refutation, “it simply dawned on me that that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about [pesticides] and that I was being duped along with millions of other Americans.” He demolished Carson’s arguments and assertions, calling attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.
The legacy of Rachel Carson is that tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors. This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/
A majority of the populous operates on emotion, wishful thinking, magical thinking and hearsay. They have neither the time, nor the inclination to get to the bottom of things. One of these, college educated and nearing retirement age, recently informed me that the Arctic and Greenland have melted and are ice-free.
How about all the “psychological studies” that generally show those with Conservative political beliefs are “different” … and almost always inferior or defective in some manner to those with Liberal beliefs. Ditto AGW Deniers.
Just one example
Nature Neuroscience 10, 1246 – 1247 (2007)
Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism
“Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty”
I didn’t want to buy the article … but the odds are there is probably a citation from Stapel in the article and that All the authors are of the Liberal persuasion.
So, when I simply changed my political position from voting for Liberal policies and politicians when I was in my twenties to being a Conservative, my entire psyche and morality did a flip-flop.
Who knew.
I thought I was just making a political decision when I pulled a voting lever … not an emotional and psychological make-over. OSHA better put warnings in each election booth on the psychological dangers of voting.
rabbit says:
April 30, 2013 at 7:31 am
As a researcher, I know full well how enticing it can be to present less than the full truth by cherry picking the results. You don’t even need malfeasance – only an eagerness to substantiate your own ideas.
But scientists are not lawyers. It’s not our job to advocate a position at almost any cost, but to present the truth even when we don’t like it. We must be our own work’s greatest skeptic. Not easy to do consistently.
————————————————
rabbit, it’s not done consistently and if Lew and sociology and the Team and climastrology are an indication of the problem it’s not done much at all.
cn
I believe this is where the fight should go.
Here are some of my very basic requirements.
If you use public money for any research you must:
Show you are a good steward with our money and our data.
Explain your decision processes you made along the way such as: Why you chose that site, which data you ignored and why, provide all data with all computer programs that enable future validation of your research claims, etc.
It’s incumbent upon the researcher and the peer reviewers to prove the case.
Plus above all else you mustshow your work.
Research done on the taxpayer dime belongs to the people.
You can’t get much more socialist than that.
Michael Moore could explain that to Michael Mann.
Nah! You can’t tell Mann anything.
cn
oops
cn
Kent Clizbe says:
April 30, 2013 at 5:54 am
“Attempting to argue with PC-Progs with logic is useless.”
Exactly.
Alinsky, Rules For Radicals:
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
In climate science:
Make skeptics play by scientific rules and make them work on their refutations to an ever growing avalanche of bogus warmist papers. Ignore the refutations and pump your bogus warmist papers into the media outlets the warmists control (Reuters is controlled by Pascal Lamy, a globalist ultra warmist, for instance). Whenever a skeptic dares to deviate from the scientific rulebook cry foul, but ignore it yourself to churn out more quantity.
What we have here is a Rasputin like quality; pump the politicians full of disinformation until the politicians are scared sh*tless themselves and grant you every wish; exotic locations for warmist conferences, all the supercomputers you want, and grants, grants, grants.
@Rob
“It is quite interesting psychologically. He says he originally did faithfully accurate attempts to work out complicated relationships and found journals were not ‘into that’. ”
“So, your paper here says that your experiment was completely inconclusive and more testing is needed? Get back to us after you finish the additional testing and quit wasting our time.”
Stapel worked at Tilburg University, the only university in The Netherlands that granted Al Gore a Honorary degree (Doctor Honoris Causa).
Explains a lot about the quality standards of this university, doesn’t it?
Kent Clizbe says:
April 30, 2013 at 10:26 am
Actually, all that’s needed is an insider whistleblower.
In fact, it’s likely the only way that such fraud will be uncovered. Viz the fraudster in Holland. It was his grad students who did him in.
———————
I get where you’re coming from but there is no fraud.
At least we can’t prove everyone is lying.
Each researcher spouts his opinion of his research and what it told him is his truth.
With no standards of data gathering, data handling and adjustment, data storing, the peer review process and public dissemination of everything, they pretty much do as they chose.
They even have their own programs for selecting and displaying their findings and we are not allowed to have them and often not even to know what they are.
I believe every phase of climastrology from site selection to choosing data to be included or excluded to how much to adjust the temperature up is completely subjective and that’s why they don’t give us their data and methods.
It’s not that they’re lying but I doubt they can justify their decisions.
Too many gut feelings. Too much gigo.
cn
Chuck,
“I get where you’re coming from but there is no fraud.
At least we can’t prove everyone is lying.”
You can’t prove it now, that is. We suspect it, though.
With an insider whistleblower, you can learn the truth.
Everything now is supposition and conjecture, based on brilliant analysis from WUWT, McIntyre, ClimateDepot and many others.
Only an insider, who works in the labs of the AGW cult, will be able to bring the truth to light.
Just do a find and replace for Stapel to Mann.
“It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth”
Makes me think of this.
To all those seeking to deflect by claiming that “sociology is not science”, I call hooey. Physics is the hardest of hard sciences – and you can’t do anything beyond freshman mechanics without some level of statistical analysis. The researchers in the physical sciences are just as subject to the cognitive biases and temptations described in this article as any other researchers.
How very dare you!!!!!!
Climate Scientists are living saints so I hope you are all struck down with a plague of flatulence. That you disbelievers dare to think that climate scientists are not different than the rest if the populace – subject to the same human frailties – shows how warped your thinking is. Unspeakable things must happen to you all for your blaspheme (call it green karma) because clearly you hate the Earth Mother and want her to prostitute herself for your big oil funded pollution fantasies*.
/sarc
* p.s. I am still seeking funding for ‘climate change affects breasts and buttocks’. Interested editors can leave a donation behind the 2nd left sink of Acton Town station.
a unit of measurement for the fineness of silk or nylon or rayon; “with an evening dress one wears 10 denier stockings”
I commented the following on Retraction Watch, two days ago:
Stapel mainly improved the efficiency of this kind of nonsense science a bit by making up the data. He has been a fraud, but at least he is now talking about it, and this may help science worldwide.
Many people are still angry with Stapel, but they would better focus their anger on still ongoing nonsense science and politically correct fraud. For instance, the renowned journal Psychological Science has an absolutely insane and harmful paper by Stephan Lewandowsky in press. Why are the good psychologists not protesting? And it is getting worse. I quote Jo Nova today:
– Over Easter, psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky moved from Perth to Bristol (lucky UK). He’s the psychologist who is expert in an imaginary group of humans called “Climate deniers”. Neither he, nor anyone else has ever met one but he discovered their imaginary motivations by surveying the confused groups who hate them. As you would, right?
None of the so-called researchers can explain what scientific observations a climate denier, denies. It’s an abuse of English, profoundly unscientific, but has some success in shutting down public debate, if that’s what you want.
Can humans change the weather and stop the storms? If you know we can, Lewandowsky calls that “science”. If you wonder “how much”, you are a denier.
The Royal Society, possibly reaching a tipping point in its rush to abject scientific decay, has immediately awarded him the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/an-illuminating-profile-of-diederik-stapel-in-the-new-york-times-magazine/