A week ago I posted my comments on pseudo-economics and a couple of days later someone drew my attention to Michael LaCour's mess.
That's right, I am not up to date on my bullshit news! And if some of you are not either: Michael LaCour is a political-science PhD aspirant at UCLA. Last year, he successfully pushed through academic approvals and straight into mass media his research, which "empirically proved" that voters' opinions on gay marriage could be positively shifted based on a single 20-minite conversation with an LGBT person relating his/her story.
Of course, it was a fake! Not only the results were falsified, the entire study was a fiction. As I was trying to explain in the previous post, there is a lot of this shit going on, especially in social sciences. Surprisingly, it got exposed as a fraud within just one year!
Oh, my! What a case in point! Or rather a case in multiple points I've been addressing from time to time. Here are a few:
Point 1. Nowadays, you can literally fake anything – data, documents, careers, personae and personalities, talents, beauty, courage, loyalty, honesty, news, finances, science, art, national histories, even entire lives, as long as you wrap it in an impressive package and your lies hit the right spot in the target audience. The gullible, superficial, ignorant, and plain stupid majority of contemporary humans make terrifically fertile soil for all kind of schemers and fakers to sow their poisonous seeds. What used to be a crime of skillful con artists and corrupt governments has become a way of life for quite a few people; many of them very successful and well known.
Point 2. Nobody is doing their job and/or paying attention. It is impossible to count how many times I brought up this issue, both in writing and in conversations. LaCour's blatant fakery passed with flying colors through multiple stages of mandatory academic, "accuracy-liable" reporting, and widespread public assessments. Faculty advisers, peer reviewers, editors of research journals, social justice non-profits, mass-media reporters and their respective editors – they all accepted and approved the study's premise, methodology, findings, and conclusions.
Even LaCour's "co-author," Columbia University political science professor Donald Green didn't bother to check the validity of the data presented to him. (This is how it works, by the way, in academia in all countries – you need some professor's name on your papers to get them published). I can vividly see all these people, too impotent to engage any critical reasoning, speed-reading the first and the last 10 pages of the paper and being bedazzled by colorful charts and tables of numbers.
Point 3. Media and public perception will always prevail over reason and truth. Because for the past several years gay marriage has been one of the hottest topics on the journalistic radar, publication of the study in Science magazine worked like a spark for the international print media engine. As the result, the research was headlined in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, and This American Life.
Because people read about it in these "respected" newspapers and magazines (oh, they've failed us so many times – but people don't want to learn), nobody questioned the fact that the study contradicted the times-proven concept that the vast majority of people tend to hold on to their social and political opinions regardless of what they read or hear. Moreover, everyone's daily personal interactions are miniature studies in people's staunch stubbornness and inability to absorb opponents' arguments; alas, that was also ignored.
It takes an extraordinary power of persuasion of some very special people who possess illuminating brilliance of the mind, impressive oratory skills, and innate guruship (all of it at the same time) to alter minds and souls. And I don't think you can find 100 of those in Los Angeles, or the entire state of California, or any single nation. Hell, let me be honest – I think it would be hard to find 100 people like that on this entire planet.
Yet, the confused liberal do-gooders got so excited about the "scientifically proven" possibility of influencing potential voters through a simple tool of a 20-minute conversation, many of them shook their donors' wallets and scraped their budget barrels in order to fund multiple LGBT canvasing projects. Are you ready? Ireland's Yes Campaign publicly connects the successful legalization of gay marriage in that country six weeks ago to their use of LaCour's paper as a template in targeting conservative voters with personal stories' recounts. Not the years of political struggle, constitutional law reviews, tremendous cultural shifts of the past 20 years affecting generations of people in many countries, but one single (and short) conversation!
Point 4. Common sense is all you need to see the truth. (It's getting to be my mantra, isn't it?) David Brookman, another graduate student at University of California (only in Berkley, not LA) took a quick look at some of the input data presented in LaCour's research and went like, "What the fuck?" Or something to that effect - I wasn't really there. He didn't need any heavy investigative machinery or extensive computer modeling – just simple arithmetic in his head: 10,000 of "recorded" contacts at a disclosed incentives of $100 a pop, that's… $1,000,000!!! Who the hell funded this scientifically uncertain PhD research in the first place? (The fact that nobody, not even the co-author, has put two and two together before Brookman did literally makes my blood boil.) And was it some highly reputable survey organization that handled this substantial sum? Nah, the name didn't ring any bells, like at all. After that it was just unspooling the lies.
Point 5. The unrepairable damage of pseudoscientific bullshit. They come in different shapes and forms, and they can manifest themselves right away or in the distant future, but there is no question about it - nothing good ever comes out of pseudoscience and falsified research. Whether it's Nazi's eugenics providing foundation for racial extermination, or "medical cures" of homosexuality destroying lives, or pulp sci-fi replacing healthcare and education for millions of people around the world - some terrible fallout always follows.
Without getting all preachy and embarking on a rant about the amorality of LaCour's con, let me instead mention its two more tangible negative outcomes.
As soon as the fraud was exposed, The Wall Street Journal (one of the original heralds of the "revolutionary" findings), in a typical swing to the other extreme, gave its editorial page to some conservative "scientists" to vent their righteous indignation. These theoreticians, of course, couldn't possibly miss the opportunity to denounce all of social science (I guess, that includes Economics) as unscientific and nothing more than "liberal wishful thinking."
Because so many civil-rights advocacy groups associated themselves with LaCour's bullshit and, as I mentioned before, spent gifted, bequeathed, and granted funds replicating the experiment that never was, they discredited themselves as organizations and people who didn't know what they were doing. Even staunch supporters feel embarrassed by those leaders who succumbed to someone's unscrupulous methods of advancing their academic careers. I am guessing, a few non-profit heads will roll.
And truthfully I cannot possibly feel sorry for these fools. Just like I didn't feel sorry for Bernie Madoff's victims. These people want to hear the "good news" so badly, they become eager and willing participants in these not-so-clever schemes.
The Frustrated CFO 