FT: Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

SNT Gatchaman

SNT Gatchaman

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Source blogs (first 2 published entries of 4) —

[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): "Clusterfake"
[110] Data Falsificada (Part 2): "My Class Year Is Harvard"

This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino.

In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020).
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So an expert in dishonesty has been dishonest, getting away with it for at least a decade?

They've used their training in dishonesty, presumably to do it properly, much better than unqualified non expert dishonesterers.

Getting away with it for over a decade - that's ongoing commitment, and skill, in their chosen field, that is.

I mean, what did people thing that skill set was going to be used for?

Bakers bake, vets vet, mechanics mechanic, experts on dishonesty, clearly......
 
Here’s the Unsealed Report Showing How Harvard Concluded That a Dishonesty Expert Committed Misconduct — (Archived)

Harvard Business School’s investigative report into the behavioral scientist Francesca Gino was made public this week, revealing extensive details about how the institution came to conclude that the professor committed research misconduct in a series of papers.

The nearly 1,300-page document was unsealed after a Tuesday ruling from a Massachusetts judge, the latest development in a $25 million lawsuit that Gino filed last year against Harvard University, the dean of the Harvard Business School, and three business-school professors who first notified Harvard of red flags in four of her papers. All four have been retracted.
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The committee’s report details how the investigation started with a complaint submitted by a group of anonymous researchers. They have since been revealed to be the trio of business-school professors who blog together as Data Colada. The investigation relied on interviews with seven people including Gino, electronic files of hers, an outside firm’s forensic analyses, interview transcripts, and written responses, according to the report.
Harvard had initially submitted the report in October as part of a partial motion to dismiss Gino’s lawsuit, which alleged that she had been defamed, that she had been the subject of gender discrimination, and that Harvard had breached her contract. Gino had argued to keep the report sealed, but Judge Myong J. Joun, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, ruled this week that it is a judicial record “to which there exists a presumptive right of public access.”
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Expanding on the New York Times piece, a blog from Oct 2023 A Post Mortem on the Gino Case, with further commentary in another blog this week from Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science at Columbia.

“A Post Mortem on the Gino Case”: “Committing fraud is, right now, a viable career strategy that can propel you at the top of the academic world.”

We’ve called this the research incumbency rule: once a paper has been published, people act like it’s correct. There’s a high threshold for post-publication criticsm.
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We’ve called this the research incumbency rule: once a paper has been published, people act like it’s correct. There’s a high threshold for post-publication criticsm.
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This makes no sense at all. When are we supposed to be able to challenge then? Only the authors and editors/peer reviewers have access to the paper before publication.
 
Utsikt said:
This makes no sense at all. When are we supposed to be able to challenge then? Only the authors and editors/peer reviewers have access to the paper before publication.
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That's really the main takeaway, isn't? That the idea is that it isn't open to challenge. Almost every single instance of legitimate criticism I have seen over the years has been to dismiss and whine that it's a personal attack, that it's best to leave this to the whims of editors who may or may not decide to publish a commentary, then leave it to people to decide who's right and who's wrong. Which literally leaves us with the whole purpose of modern propaganda: here are multiple competing versions of the truth, none of which are reliable, everyone has an agenda and is lying to you.

The whole system has basically stopped functioning as intended, with hardly anyone noticing it. The entire premise is of open and frank criticism, leading to a self-correcting system, but in reality academics treat their papers in a similar way as Uber drivers: anything less than 5 stars is a negative review, and so do editors. A paper being retracted, something that needs to be celebrated as it's a necessary component of a self-correcting system, is instead seen as a mark of shame.

And that doesn't even cover the fact that even post-publication criticism on basic factual statements often doesn't even matter. A system intended to work on facts has been corrupted to work on vibes and feels about facts.
 
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