A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
70 comments
·March 9, 2025irrational
odyssey7
Interpersonal connections can matter more than results for one’s career. Spotting an influencer’s error risks closing important doors.
OfCounsel
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
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.
Aurornis
> 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.
jakobnissen
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
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
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")
throwawaysleep
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.
RachelF
>"At worst, straight to jail."
The "at worst" is worse: Two recent Boeing whistleblowers died in rather suspicious circumstances.
tim333
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.
watwut
Academic whistle-blower won't go to jail. Government ones do and big companies ones do.
otherme123
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.
fastball
Which company whistle-blower has gone to jail?
pjdesno
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
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."
Yoric
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
So it didn't end well. Your friend had no career in academia because he criticized his master's work
Yoric
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.
mirawelner
I have always wondered if the threshold for 'number of papers published' to get a professorship is higher than the number of high quality papers that can reasonably published in that amount of time. So, people cut corners and publish bad papers or commit outright fraud. Because they do that, this keeps the required number of publications unreasonably high.
rich_sasha
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
jmward01
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
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.
dash2
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
* 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
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
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?
bonzini
Better link (the actual post mortem): https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/
hiAndrewQuinn
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.
xtiansimon
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?
hn_throwaway_99
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.
NanoYohaneTSU
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
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.)
Apreche
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
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
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.
throwawaysleep
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.
> 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.