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[contemporaneous discussion, more recent]
Caveat: I'm pretty confident that Gino is either guilty as sin or so negligent as to be guilty, and probably both given that she'd signed onto other fraudy-as-fuck research without a care before. A good many of her deflections are not just naked, but often wrong, and those that aren't wrong are meaningless. The lawsuit is, in particular, an indictment of both Gino and her lawyers -- and that the DataColada crew couldn't get legal fees after succeeding an indictment of the courts. Much of her defenders embody of the adage about "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." and that's a part of it.
So, to be blunt, I'm not a fan.
... but I do notice that she's also unusual, and not in the way I wish she was unusual. Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious. Sam Yoon isn't up a creek until the investigation turns in; it's not hard to list piles of academic misconduct that's just everyday charlatanism, much of which isn't even worth a retraction nevermind direct real punishment. There are other fraudsters that get the hammer, but even there, academia tends to keep the wheel of justice slow, fine, and prone to false negatives: Stapel got got and literally none of his students did, Wansink lost his job and we never even got an answer for what fakes were direct lies rather than p-hacking, yada yada.
It's not enough to say that her fraud is unusual. There are so many rules, and so many ways to do academic misconduct, and so many ways to slice academic misconduct, that it's always possible to explain why one case was vital without lending any predictive power, nor explain why one case was important and the others weren't. And bureaucracies inventing and applying a thicket of rules only to enforce them when desired is absolutely a thing that happens, and something that people like Ackman has seen.
What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.
... which gets rough for 2rafa's take. There's a world where the education and test-taking makes for better decisions, better responses, better actions, and better systems, where elites mean extreme focus in specialized capabilities. There's a world where it's status-farming, or Goodharting, or some very precise games-of-thronesing, where elites are just a class identity for a class that doesn't even pretend to try for its claimed focuses. These worlds aren't even incompatible!
But then you have to run into this world. We're in one where Gino got into, and succeeded at, Harvard for nearly two decades. Dias made it into Harvard and the Time 100 Next before spinning his wheels as one of a dozen lab leaders doing this sort of research on the planet, absolutely wasting it, and another one of those lab leads pretending to replicate part of his tots-real data.
I dunno. I don't want to put words in 2rafa's mouth. If the argument is on whether everything must or should be a status game, I'd agree with you, and find that's not a healthy sort of nihilism to take, and not a healthy reason to want to ignore it all. I don't think that's the position, but if it is, or even if it's a decent read, it's not a good thing.
If the argument is on whether everything is or has become a status game... I'd be stuck having to quibble on the 'everything', and doing so would be a faint defense, or defenders of these approaches to education and academia might feel they have to argue that their output is just better than nothing and I'd have to do the work to believe that. I might be wrong in that pessimism! But I have my reasons, and, thankfully, it's an argument we can have based on facts.
Yeah, the same Ivy league academia that employed literal weather underground terrorists as professors. This is borderline naive, especially as you say that the overall structure of investigation and punishment is as opaque and arbitrary as it gets. Given the current corrupt structure of Academia I think it more likely than not that this prosecution is going to make things even worse.
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Ariely threw Gino under the bus, did he not? Astute, if immoral.
Perhaps. There's a really awkward question about whether he knew, or suspected, or just was in a sufficiently target-rich environment that any finger-pointing would hit a fraudster.
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