Interesting Articles

[benji]

This was pretty hot, I got off often:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie

They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?

Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.

Haaretz once called Ariely “the busiest Israeli in the world.” I met him several times in the past year, although he agreed to speak on the record mostly in writing. A stimulating and slightly unnerving interlocutor, he has coarse black bangs, tented eyebrows, and the frank but hooded aspect of an off-duty mentalist or a veteran card-counter. “Predictably Irrational” considerably expanded his sphere of influence. He started a lab at Duke called the Center for Advanced Hindsight, which was funded by BlackRock and MetLife. He had a wife and two young children in Durham, but spent only a handful of days a month in town. In a given week, he might fly from São Paulo to Berlin to Tel Aviv. At talks, he wore rumpled polos and looked as though he’d trimmed his hair with a nail clipper in an airport-lounge rest room. He has said that he worked with multiple governments and Apple. He had ideas for how to negotiate with the Palestinians. When an interviewer asked him to list the famous names in his phone contacts, he affected humility: “Jeff Bezos, the C.E.O. of Amazon—is that good?” He went on: the C.E.O.s of Procter & Gamble and American Express, the founder of Wikipedia. In 2012, he said, he got an e-mail from Prince Andrew, who invited him to the palace for tea. Ariely’s assistant had to send him a jacket and tie via FedEx. He couldn’t bring himself, as an Israeli, to say “Your Royal Highness,” so he addressed the Prince by saying “Hey.”

Ariely seemed to know everything and everyone. “What an amazing life to lead,” a former doctoral student in his lab said. “It was like ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel.’ ” He told people that he’d climbed Annapurna and rafted down the Mekong River. But he was also attentive. “Every single time I went into the room and interacted with Dan, it was unbelievably enjoyable,” the student said. At one talk, he auctioned off a hundred-dollar bill, with the stipulation that the second-highest bidder would also have to pay. The winner owed a hundred and fifty dollars; the loser owed a hundred and forty-five dollars for nothing. Both might have felt like idiots, but Ariely wasn’t scornful; he sympathized. His knowledge of human behavior could be burdensome. “It makes daily interactions a little difficult,” he said. “I know all kinds of methods to convince people to do things I want them to do.” He told me, “Just imagine that you could separate the people who are your real friends from the people who want something from you. . . . And now ask yourself if you really want to know this about them.”

One of his frequent collaborators was Francesca Gino, a rising star in the field. Gino is in her mid-forties, with dark curly hair and a frazzled aspect. She grew up in Italy, where she pursued a doctorate in economics and management. Members of her cohort remember her dedication, industry, and commitment. She first came to Harvard Business School as a visiting fellow, and, once she completed her Ph.D., in 2004, she stayed on as a postdoc. She later said that she went to Harvard for a nine-month stint and never left. This story elides a few detours. By the end of her postdoc, in 2006, she had yet to publish an academic paper, and Harvard did not extend an offer. One of her mentors at Harvard, a professor named Max Bazerman, helped make introductions; she eventually landed a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon. A senior colleague who knew her at the time told me, “That entire experience could plausibly have left her with a keen sense of the fragility and precariousness of academic careers.” At last, she seemed to find her footing, and it soon looked as though she could get almost any study to produce results. She secured a job at U.N.C., where she entered a phase of elevated productivity. According to her C.V., she published seven journal papers in 2009; in 2011, an astonishing eleven.

Ariely and Gino frequently collaborated on dishonesty. In the paper “The Dark Side of Creativity,” they showed that “original thinkers,” who can dream up convincing justifications, tend to lie more easily. For “The Counterfeit Self,” she and Ariely had a group of women wear what they were told were fake Chloé sunglasses—the designer accessories, in an amusing control, were actually real—and then take a test. They found that participants who believed they were wearing counterfeit sunglasses cheated more than twice as much as the control group. In “Sidetracked,” Gino’s first pop-science book, she seems to note that such people were not necessarily corrupt: “Being human makes all of us vulnerable to subtle influences.” In 2010, she returned to Harvard Business School, where she was awarded an endowed professorship and later became the editor of a leading journal. She dispensed page-a-day-calendar advice on LinkedIn: “Life is an unpredictable journey. . . . The challenge isn’t just setting our path, but staying on it amidst chaos.” She was a research consultant for Disney, and a speakers bureau quoted clients between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars to book her for gigs. In 2020, she was the fifth-highest-paid employee at Harvard, earning about a million dollars that year—slightly less than the university’s president.

Gino drew admiring notice from those who could not believe her productivity. The business-school professor said, “She’s not just brilliant and successful and wealthy—she has been a kind, fun person to know. She was well liked even by researchers who were skeptical of her work.” But she drew less admiring notice, too—also from people who could not believe her productivity. As one management scholar told me, “You just cannot trust someone who is publishing ten papers a year in top journals.” Other co-authors, as collateral beneficiaries, weren’t sure what to think. One former graduate student thought that she caught Gino plagiarizing portions of a literature review, but tried to convince herself that it was an honest error. Later, in a study for a different paper, “Gino was, like, ‘I had an idea for an additional experiment that would tie everything together, and I already collected the data and wrote it up—here are the results.’ ” The former graduate student added, “My adviser was, like, ‘Did you design the study together? No. Did you know it was going to happen? No. Has she sent you the data? No. Something off is happening here.’ ” (Gino declined to address these allegations on the record.)

In late 2010, Gino was helping to coördinate a symposium for an Academy of Management conference, on “behavioral ethics,” which listed Ariely as a contributor. At the time, Gino and Bazerman were researching moral identity. Ariely’s findings with the car-insurance company remained unpublished, but his talks had made the rounds, and his field study seemed like the perfect companion piece for joint publication. “I suggest we add them as co-authors and write up the paper for a top tier journal,” Gino later wrote, by e-mail.

The paper, which was published in 2012, became an event. Signing the honesty pledge at the beginning, Ariely found, reduced cheating by about ten per cent. The Obama Administration included the paper’s findings in an annual White House report. Government bodies in the U.K., Canada, and Guatemala initiated studies to determine whether they should revise their tax forms, and estimated that they might recoup billions of dollars a year. Kahneman told me that he saw no reason to disbelieve the results, which were clearly compatible with the orientation of the field. “But many things that might work don’t,” he told me. “And it’s not necessarily clear a priori.”

[benji]

The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda
The godfather of the New Age led a secretive group of devoted followers in the last decade of his life. His closest "witches" remain missing, and former insiders, offering new details, believe the women took their own lives.

If this name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the "Godfather of the New Age," Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, don Juan, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.

Under don Juan's tutelage, Castaneda took peyote, talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. All this took place in what don Juan called "a separate reality." Castaneda, who died in 1998, was, from 1971 to 1982, one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the country. During his lifetime, his books sold at least 10 million copies.

Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them "beautifully lucid" and remarked on a "narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies." They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success.

Castaneda, who disappeared from the public view in 1973, began in the last decade of his life to organize a secretive group of devoted followers. His tools were his books and Tensegrity, a movement technique he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans. A corporation, Cleargreen, was set up to promote Tensegrity; it held workshops attended by thousands. Novelist and director Bruce Wagner, a member of Castaneda's inner circle, helped produce a series of instructional videos. Cleargreen continues to operate to this day, promoting Tensegrity and Castaneda's teachings through workshops in Southern California, Europe and Latin America.

At the heart of Castaneda's movement was a group of intensely devoted women, all of whom were or had been his lovers. They were known as the witches, and two of them, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, vanished the day after Castaneda's death, along with Cleargreen president Amalia Marquez and Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundahl. A few weeks later, Patricia Partin, Castaneda's adopted daughter as well as his lover, also disappeared. In February 2006, a skeleton found in Death Valley, Calif., was identified through DNA analysis as Partin's.

Some former Castaneda associates suspect the missing women committed suicide. They cite remarks the women made shortly before vanishing, and point to Castaneda's frequent discussion of suicide in private group meetings. Achieving transcendence through a death nobly chosen, they maintain, had long been central to his teachings.

All four books were lavishly praised. Michael Murphy, a founder of Esalen, remarked that the "essential lessons don Juan has to teach are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India." There were raves in the New York Times, Harper's and the Saturday Review. "Castaneda's meeting with Don Juan," wrote Time's Robert Hughes, "now seems one of the most fortunate literary encounters since Boswell was introduced to Dr. Johnson."

In 1972, anthropologist Paul Riesman reviewed Castaneda's first three books in the New York Times Book Review, writing that "Castaneda makes it clear that the teachings of don Juan do tell us something of how the world really is." Riesman's article ran in place of a review the Times had initially commissioned from Weston La Barre, one of the foremost authorities on Native American peyote ceremonies. In his unpublished article, La Barre denounced Castaneda's writing as "pseudo-profound deeply vulgar pseudo-ethnography."

After 1973, the year of the Time exposé, Castaneda never again responded publicly to criticism. Instead, he went into seclusion, at least as far as the press was concerned (he still went to Hollywood parties). Claiming he was complying with don Juan's instruction to become "inaccessible," he no longer allowed himself to be photographed, and (in the same year the existence of the Nixon tapes was made public) he decided that recordings of any sort were forbidden. He also severed ties to his past; after attending C.J.'s junior high graduation and promising to take him to Europe, he soon banished his ex-wife and son.

And he made don Juan disappear. When "The Second Ring of Power" was published in 1977, readers learned that sometime between the leap into the abyss at the end of "Tales of Power" and the start of the new book, don Juan had vanished, evanescing into a ball of light and entering the nagual. His seclusion also helped Castaneda, now in his late 40s, conceal the alternative family he was starting to form. The key members were three young women: Regine Thal, Maryann Simko and Kathleen "Chickie" Pohlman, whom Castaneda had met while he was still active at UCLA. Simko was pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology and was known around campus as Castaneda's girlfriend. Through her, Castaneda met Thal, another anthropology Ph.D. candidate and Simko's friend from karate class. How Pohlman entered the picture remains unclear.

In 1973, Castaneda purchased a compound on the aptly named Pandora Avenue in Westwood. The women, soon to be known both in his group and in his books as "the witches," moved in. They eventually came to sport identical short, dyed blond haircuts similar to those later worn by the Heaven's Gate cult. They also said they'd studied with don Juan.

According to Wallace and Jennings, one of the witches' tasks was to recruit new members. Melissa Ward, a Los Angeles area caterer, was involved in the group from 1993 to 1994. "Frequently they recruited at lectures," she told me. Among the goals, she said, was to find "women with a combination of brains and beauty and vulnerability." Initiation into the inner family often involved sleeping with Castaneda, who, the witches claimed in public appearances, was celibate.

In "Sorcerer's Apprentice," Wallace provides a detailed picture of her own seduction. Because of her father's friendship with Castaneda, her case was unusual. Over the years, he'd stop by the Wallace home. When Irving died in 1990, Amy was living in Berkeley, Calif. Soon after, Castaneda called and told her that her father had appeared to him in a dream and said he was trapped in the Wallace's house, and needed Amy and Carlos to free him.

Wallace, suitably skeptical, came down to L.A. and the seduction began in earnest. She recounts how she soon found herself in bed with Castaneda. He told her he hadn't had sex for 20 years. When Wallace later worried she might have gotten pregnant (they'd used no birth control), Castaneda leapt from the bed, shouting, "Me make you pregnant? Impossible! The nagual's sperm isn't human ... Don't let any of the nagual's sperm out, nena. It will burn away your humanness." He didn't mention the vasectomy he'd had years before.

The courtship continued for several weeks. Castaneda told her they were "energetically married." One afternoon, he took her to the sorcerer's compound. As they were leaving, Wallace looked at a street sign so she could remember the location. Castaneda furiously berated her: A warrior wouldn't have looked. He ordered her to return to Berkeley. She did. When she called, he refused to speak to her.

The witches, however, did, instructing Wallace on the sorceric steps necessary to return. She had to let go of her attachments. Wallace got rid of her cats. This didn't cut it. Castaneda, she wrote, got on the phone and called her an egotistical, spoiled Jew. He ordered her to get a job at McDonald's. Instead, Wallace waitressed at a bed and breakfast. Six months later she was allowed back.

Aspiring warriors, say Jennings, Wallace and Ward, were urged to cut off all contact with their past lives, as don Juan had instructed Carlos to do, and as Castaneda had done by cutting off his wife and adopted son. "He was telling us how to get out of family obligations," Jennings told me. "Being in one-on-one relationships would hold you back from the path. Castaneda was telling us how to get out of commitments with family, down to small points like how to avoid hugging your parents directly." Jennings estimates that during his four years with the group, between 75 and 100 people were told to cut off their families. He doesn't know how many did.

For some initiates, the separation was brutal and final. According to Wallace, acolytes were told to tell their families, "I send you to hell." Both Wallace and Jennings tell of one young woman who, in the group's early years, had been ordered by Castaneda to hit her mother, a Holocaust survivor. Many years later, Wallace told me, the woman "cried about it. She'd done it because she thought he was so psychic he could tell if she didn't." Wallace also describes how, when one young man's parents died soon after being cut off, Castaneda singled him out for praise, remarking, "When you really do it, don Juan told me, they die instantly, as if you were squashing a flea -- and that's all they are, fleas."

Long after Castaneda had been discredited in academia, Korda continued to insist on his authenticity. In 2000, he wrote: "I have never doubted for a moment the truth of his stories about don Juan." Castaneda's books have been profitable for Simon and Schuster, and according to Korda, were for many years one of the props on which the publisher rested. Castaneda might have achieved some level of success if his books had been presented, as James Redfield's "Celestine Prophecy" is, as allegorical fiction. But Castaneda always insisted he'd made nothing up. "If he hadn't presented his stories as fact," Wallace told me, "it's unlikely the cult would exist. As nonfiction, it became impossibly more dangerous."

To this day, Simon and Schuster stands by Korda's position. When asked whether, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the publisher still regarded Castaneda's books as nonfiction, Adam Rothenberg, the vice president for corporate communication, replied that Simon and Schuster "will continue to publish Castaneda as we always have." Tensegrity classes are still held around the world. Workshops were recently conducted in Mexico City and Hanover, Germany. Wagner's videos are still available from Cleargreen. According to the terms of Castaneda's will, book royalties still help support a core group of acolytes. On Simon and Schuster's Web site, Castaneda is still described as an anthropologist. No mention is made of his fiction.

[Besticus Maximus]

That Casteneda story is a lot like a 60s version of Helena Blavatasky

[benji]

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin

Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record

In Gerard’s frame, and in Wikipedia’s, if something is not cited by a Reliable Source, it may as well not exist. As Gerard puts it: “if it's in [a Reliable Source]1 use the [Reliable Source], and if it's not in [a Reliable Source] then the real world didn't care.”

Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s slash-and-burn, no-questions-asked policy has led to more than a few conflicts on Wikipedia. Editors who object to his indiscriminate removals have raised the issue multiple times to Wikipedia administrators, on talk pages, and elsewhere around the site. Each time, Gerard defends the approach of indiscriminately removing everything from Unreliable Sources, generally carrying on with removals as the disputes carry on. Each time, the arguments peter out with nothing in particular changing. In one case, another Wikipedia administrator, Sandstein, pushed to ban a user for repeatedly criticizing Gerard’s judgment on the matter.

In other words, whatever Wikipedia’s written policy, the practical day-to-day reality is that Gerard will remove Unreliable Sources en masse with terse explanations and with little consideration for actual content, digging in with elaborate justification when pressed. Given that, it’s worth examining the reliability battles Gerard picks.

Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable. The debate, to be clear, is not between tabloids and the New York Times, a battle the Times cleanly wins. In Gerard’s world, scientists and academics who publish in Quillette or Reason are to have even their opinions discarded entirely, while to cast any doubt on the reliability of the word of Huffington “the truth is not in them” Post and PinkNews is absurd.

From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia.

The article for Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich, one of Gerard’s quiet focuses, provides an illustration. Gerard had made his article, after all, back when Gerard was just a tech nerd and Eich a force in building out the software infrastructure he relied on. But in 2008, Eich donated against gay marriage. After another user added mention of that donation to the Wikipedia page in 2012, Gerard guarded it repeatedly against deletion13. In March 2014, when Mozilla appointed Eich its CEO, Gerard’s social circles erupted in fury. Eich stepped down quickly. Immediately, Gerard entered the talk page and the article to ensure Eich’s opposition to gay marriage became central to his Wikipedia narrative. In the first few months of 2014, Gerard edited Eich’s article nineteen times, fleshing out details about the controversy and removing older external links more focused on Eich’s technical work. Between 2019 and 2020, Gerard repeatedly fought to make the “Known for” box on Eich’s page mention opposition to same-sex marriage and avoid any mention of Eich’s projects beyond JavaScript.14 After all, Gerard pointed out as he added a PinkNews reference to the claim—it was in a Reliable Source.

Hold on, you might be thinking. Surely you’re not saying he got around Wikipedia’s ban on citing his original research by feeding all his obsessions to his old friend before citing his friend.

No, of course not. That would be crass.

They got another friend to review the book when it came out, and he cited that.

In February 2021, after Scott rearranged his life and quit his job in order to minimize the disruption from his name being revealed, then doxxed himself, the New York Times finally published its article. Off of Wikipedia, Gerard was thrilled, bragging about how much he had been able to land in a Reliable Source:

i sent Metz SO MUCH material for that NYT SlateStarCodex article, i can see the ghosts of what i sent

every phrase is firmly backed up by multiple sources - but it was run through the NYT mealymouthed centrist filter

In particular, he noted that he had encouraged Metz to use Scott’s real name. “[I]t isn't the article we wanted,” he noted on his favorite snark page, “and I suspect Cade wanted it stronger too. But it's good enough.”

Good enough indeed, and he quickly got to work fending off critical responses to the NYT article on Scott’s Wikipedia page. After someone pointed out a long list of critical responses from The Hill, Reason, Quillette, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, journalist Cathy Young, and others, Gerard shrugged: “Zero of those are [Reliable Sources], so we can’t use them.”

Policy, you see. Hands were tied.

This time, though, people were paying attention, and Gerard had a problem: While you can get away with a great deal when people aren’t looking, Wikipedia does not actually want to be known as the site where people spend decades compiling dossiers against their personal enemies.

Gerard defended himself gamely for a while when people escalated the dispute up the Wikipedia bureaucracy. “Stop casting aspersions,” he told people who claimed he had a conflict of interest. “You’re making a bizarre claim.” “Do you have diffs22 from Wikipedia” demonstrating a conflict of interest?

When someone pointed out that Wikipedia explicitly prohibited the sort of edits Gerard was doing, noting that “an editor who is involved in a significant controversy or dispute with another individual—whether on- or off-wiki—or who is an avowed rival of that individual, should not edit that person's biography or other material about that person, given the potential conflict of interest,” Gerard shot back with “It's more of a no-evidencer. Supply on-wiki diffs that you consider show this, and how.” He knew the policy, of course—he helped write the policy! It was an elaborate sort of game he invited people into: You know this, I know you know it, but do you have the patience to outlast me on it?

Then an uninvolved admin, Wugapodes, caught wind of what Gerard was doing. His rant is full of Wikipedia jargon and awkwardly long to insert into what is already a behemoth of an article, but I cannot possibly do it justice without including it in full.

“Seriously, everyone, what the [f---] is wrong with us? … Reading through this discussion it seems that David has called the subject a neo-nazi, has significantly contributed to a NYT article described by other sources as a “hit piece”, disingenuously used Wikipedia to push his [point of view] despite a [conflict of interest] obvious to anyone with eyes, and we as a community are incapable of doing anything other than a warning? What the [f---] is wrong with us?”

After seven years, someone finally saw what was going on.

[killamajig]

Since I was shitting on Ed, I figured I would post one archaeological article. This is old news 2018 but I thought it was pretty cool. 

https://www.sciencealert.com/medieval-lombard-man-amputated-arm-knife-prosthesis
https://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2018vol96/Micarelli/Micarelli.pdf

This Medieval Italian Man Replaced His Amputated Hand With a Weapon

The skeleton in question was found in a Longobard necropolis in the north of Italy, dating back to around the 6th to 8th centuries CE.

On closer examination, the ends of the bone showed evidence of biomechanical pressure - reshaping of both bones to form a callus, and a bone spur on the ulna. These are consistent with the sort of pressure that might have been applied by a prosthesis.

Further evidence on the skeleton supports this hypothesis. The man's teeth showed extreme wear - a huge loss of enamel, and a bone lesion. He'd worn his teeth so far down on the right side of his mouth that he'd likely opened the pulp cavity, causing a bacterial infection.

He was probably using his teeth to tighten the straps that held it in place.

He's like some badass fantasy character. Or maybe his job was to cut a da pizza.