“It’s horrible that they’re sucking young researchers into this vortex. It’s Gigo and Gresham all the way down.”

I came across this post from 2022, The real problem of that nudge meta-analysis is not that it includes 12 papers by noted fraudsters; it’s the GIGO of it all, and I thought it was worth sharing its conclusion:

This is not a morality play. The authors of the meta-analysis worked hard and played by the rules, as the saying goes. But, as I so often say (but I hate to have to keep saying it), honesty and transparency are not enuf. If you average a bunch of biased estimates, you’ll get a biased estimate, and all the pure intentions in the world won’t solve this problem. I so so much would like the researchers who do this sort of thing to use their talents more constructively.

The people who I get mad at here are not the young authors of this paper, who are doing their best and have been admirably open with their data and methods. No, I get mad at the statistics establishment (including me!) for writing textbooks that focus on methods and say almost nothing about data quality, and I get mad at the science establishment–the National Academy of Sciences–for promoting this sort of thing (along with himmicanes, air rage, ages ending in 9, etc. etc.), not to mention the people in nudgeworld who are cool with people thinking that the average effect is so large. Don’t forget, the leaders of the field of Nudge are people who described Wansink’s papers as “masterpieces,” which makes me think they’re real suckers for people who tell them what they want to hear. It’s horrible that they’re sucking young researchers into this vortex. It’s Gigo and Gresham all the way down.

More recently, here’s a discussion of another junk science project that ensnared a young researcher, this time from Harvard, sucked into the gravitational field of a celebrity science professor. The whole thing makes me so sad.