Daniel Engber
@danengber
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In summer 2023, Harvard Business School suspended a star professor, Francesca Gino, over charges of research misconduct. By coincidence, one of her affected papers also had some funny-looking data from a *different* B-school superstar, Dan Ariely. (1/3).
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Daniel Kahneman, our greatest scientist of mistakes, has died. After drafting the manuscript for Thinking, Fast and Slow, he paid colleagues to provide anonymous advice on whether to abandon it.
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They meant to contain the fallout from the scandal and preserve their reputations. But their audit has done just the opposite. My story for The Atlantic on the spreading crisis in elite business academia:.
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The Strongest Evidence Yet That a Scientist Started the Pandemic.
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Among the many things that jump out as one reads through these behind-the-scenes discussions: the scientists clearly prefer a natural origin, as in, that's the reality they'd rather discover to be true. .
There can be no doubt the Proximal Origin authors consciously and inappropriately downplayed the #COVID19 research-related origin hypothesis and coordinated efforts manipulating media coverage. They also interacted like noxious frat boys. No longer private Slack excerpts below.
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I wrote about Daniel Kahneman, who really loved to be wrong.
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“This is some kind of mad, fraudulent unicorn,” said @jamesheathers at the time. But amazingly, all of that was just *part one* of an even bigger scandal. After the Gino allegations were made public, her peers began a large-scale audit of their field. (2/3).
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✴️✴️Look at this response from the Proximal Origin authors to a Nature reviewer on Feb 21, 2020. They simply could not be more clear about the dangers of collapsing all "lab leak" hypotheses into one:
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This scoop from @KatherineJWu has multiple mind-blowing details. Aside from providing extraordinary evidence for an animal origin for COVID-- the most convincing yet -- it raises the question of who posted these sequences, and why now.
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This preference is so blatant and so much taken for granted throughout all the communications that it's hard to focus on why it exists and whether it's appropriate.
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Daniel Kahneman showed that standard job interviews are completely pointless. Then he interviewed me, and it was weird:.
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I just can't get over how quickly scientific methods change. When I was in grad school (and it wasn't *that* long ago) we were taught to put the real data in Cambria and the fake data in Calibri.
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People born after 1990 may never truly understand the scope of the cockroach problem in NYC during the Cold War. I wanted to tell the story of the forgotten heroes of pest control who brought it to an unexpected end.
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This, from the latest batch of FOIA'd documents, is worth noting:.
2) @USRightToKnow released documents showing virologists & Wuhan researchers attempted to mislead on a DARPA grant--they hid that they would do some dangerous virus research in Wuhan. Right where the pandemic started.
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"A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy on its way to your house—and it can’t really do it.". A delightful tale of stifled innovation from @Saahil_Desai .
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Always nice to hear from America's leading COVID-origins pundit.
@danengber What a pathetically naive, pointless , self-refuting and ignorant article. The Atlantic needs to get its shit together before running such claptrap again.
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That book was a huge success, but also riddled with errors -- as a result of a methods crisis in social psychology that hadn't yet been identified. Kahneman was sometimes wrong, but also, in a biggerr sense, he was right about being wrong.
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TIRED: naming body parts after doctors. WIRED: naming doctors after body parts
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The lab leak theory, which has already been determined to be "sheer fantasy" by people who work in labs, has now been debunked, he says, by a declassified report released by ODNI. Here's what that report says:
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There's a lot of good news about vaccines. but no one wants to hear it. My take on the crisis that isn't quite:.
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The story of the dishonesty experts who are accused of lying in their research keeps getting more bizarre. If the allegations are true, this would be, as @jamesheathers puts it, a "mad, fraudulent unicorn" in the history of scientific publishing.
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More great stuff from @hiltzikm, who is unafraid to speak his truth about COVID origins, and to shame the non-non-believers
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Nature rejected the manuscript, at least in part due to authors' refusal to debunk lab leak *comprehensively*. Over the next 2 weeks, the authors gradually tweaked the paper to make the "serial passage" lab origin -- or indeed *any* other lab leak scenario -- sound less likely.
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The finding that "ice cream is good for you" has come up again and again in studies of nutritional epidemiology. @davidmjohns reports on the efforts to grapple with the dangerous and delicious data
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As for the claim that there is "no evidence" for lab leak, he's been saying that years now-- in the face of, uh, mounting evidence. That evidence may be of poor quality, and it may point in the wrong direction. But let's not fight over its existence?
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@acritschristoph I'm not clear on what you're mad about. The "strongest evidence yet" in my tweet was an ironic reference to our earlier story with a similar headline. My point is each theory of COVID origins has been accruing evidence, but of contested value and significance.
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As I've argued, *this* is the key moment that shaped early discussions of pandemic origins. The "180" done by the scientists between Feb. 1 and Feb. 4 seems less likely to have been influenced by non-scientific factors.
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There are two ways of taking pills--two and only two. You pinch the pill between your fingers and place it on your tongue. This method is the tweezers. Or: You place the pill in your palm and launch it toward your mouth. This method is the catapult.
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A 'lifeguard shortage' of some kind makes headlines each year-- and EVERY YEAR-- at around this time. You can find these stories going back about as long we've had lifeguards in America.
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New language added Mar. 3: "we do not believe that selection during passage, or any other laboratory-based scenario is necessary."
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Gino's attorney has been in the news for leading a defamation suit regarding the "Shitty Media Men" list. In 2018, Mother Jones said he'd made a name for himself "as one of the foremost defenders of male college students accused of sexual violence.".
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New language added Mar. 4: "we do not believe that any time of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
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The full evolution of the Proximal Origin paper is posted here, h/t @gdemaneuf.
I am not sure if people are fully aware of this document, but this is the full history of the drafts that lead to Proximal Origin. 216 pages in all. It includes the Nature review. #DRASTIC.
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Also noteworthy: You can see the moment where them manuscript stops referring to the fact that SARS-like coronaviruses were being passaged at low levels of biosecurity, particularly IN WUHAN. Note this sentence from the version as of Feb. 12.
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It also suggests that Gino was a victim of gender bias, and links her treatment by Data Colada to that of Amy Cuddy. More on Cuddy and the misogynistic bullying charge here:
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@zeynep "Opine" is appropriate and expected. Why wouldn't these scientists have opinions on the matter? But "prefer" is distressingly parochial. A natural origin might be preferable in some way for people who run virology labs. But for most people, all origin stories are equally "good".
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All I'm saying is: the 'Eco' mode on air conditioners seems a little fishy.
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Coming so soon after the Congressional lab-leak hearings, and the revelation that the Department of Energy had revised its findings in favor of lab origin, it seems. well-timed. Or is this yet one more seemingly unlikely coincidence meaning nothing, among all the others?. .
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THE PLAGIARISM WAR HAS BEGUN.
I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: “Material-based Design Computation,” which I completed at @MIT in 2010,. where I omitted quotation marks.
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Imagine if Kleenex weren’t just a common name for facial tissues, but also one for snot-sucking vacuum tubes and handheld tools for picking boogers. The "Ozempic" age is over.
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You just don't see those soft-foam neck braces anymore, do you?.
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Francesca Gino, an expert on dishonesty, is accused of doing dishonest research. What did her studies purport to show?. Was Gino searching for a theory of herself?.
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So as I was saying. America is too depressed about vaccines.
For all material purposes, the antivaxxers won. Their decades-long goal to seed their lies into the mainstream and get moderates to bothsides a hate campaign on the backs of people grieving unrelated death has been an unbridled success. This will become apparent in the primaries.
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As Thacker points out at length in this thread, a standard response to the DEFUSE proposal was that the most dangerous-seeming work would have taken place in the US. But author comments on the draft proposal suggest this was maybe not the case. .
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Remember when they asked Obama about the Big Bang?. The days of would-be presidents debating science appears to be over:.
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Nb. Dr. Schweitzer did not respond to an interview request for my story about a growing scandal in business academia. Months later he did send me a short email that accused his colleague of data-tampering. Again I asked if we could talk by phone and he did not respond.
@J_R_Schroeder .I wanted to publicly apologize to you. I deeply regret speaking to Engber and participating in a distorted narrative.
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Ben Hu: "I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have COVID-19-like symptoms at that time. My colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative."
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I wrote about his legacy as a scientist who loved to be wrong: .
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So @POVdocs has asked DOCNYC to provide "broader context" for its newsletter item about PBS's decision to pull the trans-themed film BREAK THE GAME from its scheduled slot on Apr. 7. 1/
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@hiltzikm I know you're about to make the metaphysical claim that evidence for lab leak-- the DEFUSE proposal, e.g.-- isn't really evidence at all. One can say this doesn't prove a thing (ofc it doesn't). But you insist on trying to adjudicate what does and doesn't exist. It's very silly.
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Here's a link to the lawsuit, below:.
The lawsuit can be read here, if anyone’s curious: (Found the link on DailyBeast).
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A national plague of workplace injuries was once a media obsession. Now it’s all but forgotten. Whatever happened to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?.
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A review of Johann Hari's MAGIC PILL, a curious book that presents as having been produced with maximum rigor, but which reveals something else entirely.
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@hiltzikm No need to keep yourself in suspense! I wrote about the mounting circumstantial evidence for both theories of origin two years ago. As you know, more information has come out since, on both sides of the ledger.
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@WiringTheBrain The best-selling Kahneman book didn't use that name but it might as well have--.
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PBS also pulled the website for the film from at least until shortly after I'd reached out for comment and the film was promptly rescheduled. Just to clarify, does this also happen to at least one film in every season for a variety of reasons?. 4/4
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The film's director, @JaneMWagner, told me that POV's executive producers were explicit about the fact that her film had lost its premiere date for political reasons-- a fact they subsequently confirmed to her by email. 3/
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If you own an iPhone this is really not a big deal. Just go to Settings-->Privacy-->Remote Detonation.
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Glad to see this story about the 100th anniversary of Safety Last, where Harold Lloyd hangs from a clock. The article doesn't quite get across that this sort of performance-- climbing a building-- was a well-established form of urban entertainment.
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Are moms better than dads at sensing whether their children are feverish? . The science says no. Also, you don't need a thermometer.
The resolution @danengber made for the year ahead: He will not take his kids' temperature. “Doing so is next to useless. Home thermometers are trash.”
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@xphilosopher What about RA-hacking, where you keep hiring different research assistants until you get the results you want.
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Joe Rogan has been promoting a podcast, "The Telepathy Tapes," that purports to prove that nonspeaking people with autism have supernatural powers. .
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Article now updated to include:. - Hu and Yu's denials to @ScienceMagazine that they were sick in autumn 2019. - Biden admin's Friday night intelligence dump, which corroborates very few of the leaked details and says the sickened-researcher story is a whole lot of nothing.
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POV's executive producers, who declined to comment for my story in The Atlantic, now suggest this was just a normal bit of rescheduling-- of the sort that happens to "at least one film every season for a variety of reasons.". 2/.
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This reminds me of how the field responded to replication failures as far back as 2016. (It was unpleasant!) Steve Spencer promised he was going to publish all of his file-drawer'd studies on the topic. Did that ever happen? @R__INDEX.
Stereotype threat does not replicate.Prior research found that women (not men) underperform on a math test to assess gender differences (d=0.82; Johns et al. 2005). But 8 studies (N=1502) failed to replicate stereotype-threat among women (d=0.01).
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New York's stalled congestion-pricing plan was a rare chance to try something different in American transportation.
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"My team have already professionally humiliated themselves. That's why they're my team.".
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Far-right icon Ammon Bundy was headed for another confrontation with government agents as they tried to take his land. Then he disappeared. @jdkstern13 reports from Idaho:.
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@James_West_PhD The heart rate values for all three time points were in the same spreadsheet column. Also the t3 heart rates weren't ordered across all participants, but only *most* of them. .
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This year's measles outbreaks are occurring almost exclusively in Democratic-leaning areas. Politics hasn't been the problem.
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In fact a 'human fly' - as they were called - was hired for $50 to climb a building to promote Lloyd's film. and fell to his death. That tragedy led NYC to crack down on such performances. Great details in this article by Jacob Smith: .
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This is an interesting point--.
@TheEthanIverson @YouseFancyPants @past_is_future To clarify, two of the names, Ben Hu and Yan Zhu were listed in western ordering (given-name surname), and the other, Yu Ping, was in Chinese ordering (surname given-name). I was prepared for the names to be consistently one way or another. That they were inconsistent is ….
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@PhilippMarkolin @hiltzikm @TheAtlantic You guys are just incredibly tiresome. I've reported on the weight of the evidence many times over the past few years
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This octopus-related incident, which occurred in 2023, is said to have caused a profound change in the author, but hard to tell what that change was? The award-winning MY OCTOPUS TEACHER came out in 2020. He'd founded the Sea Change Project in 2012.
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Novavax’s Nuvaxovid Avoids New Vax Effects.
Novavax's Nuvaxovid™ Receives Full Marketing Authorization in the EU for the Prevention of COVID
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Ackman: "This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews. We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members. ".
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