1) People definitely did get away with this, all the time. Historically, researchers had no obligation (at least that was practically enforced) to maintain and share their data and code. Peer review would check for specific methodological flaws and nothing deeper. If someone emailed you about your 1995 study in 2005, you'd say "I no longer have the code," or, more likely, simply never email them back.
2) In a highly competitive landscape where cheating is effective, the "winners" will be heavily selected for willingness to maximize the use of cheating. Even if only 1% of the population is willing to commit explicit fraud, that 1% is going to be heavily overrepresented in a world where explicit fraud gets you the top-tier publications that bring you to prominence.
3) Ariely and Gino both made millions of dollars from their fraud that they will not have to give back. It's worth emphasizing how poorly Ariely's fraud was executed -- he did the laziest possible fraud and easily converted it into money and prestige.
4) Related to the first point, it's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted since the '08-'12 time period. The replication crisis was just kicking into gear, and only among people who were paying attention to that type of thing. Ariely didn't come up reading Andrew Gelman's blog. There's simply far more light on any paper today than there would've been 10 years ago -- statistical and methodological understanding have come a long way as cohorts of academics came up in the shadow of the replication crisis. Having established credible groups like Data Colada to centralize these analyses has also been a big deal; tenured profs can't bully Data Colada by threatening their career progression the same way they could if accused via email by a random grad student.
I agree with most of your comments but perhaps with a different emphasis, and you're right, some people do get away with falsifying data but the risks are very high when that data actually matters and is subject to scrutiny.
I amplify my comments below in my reply to droopyEyelids.
My understanding is that the overall body of research suggests that artificial sweeteners don't cause additional calorie consumption. Given that is true (and leaving aside the much-studied question of other health risks from artificial sweeteners), it seems impossible that replacing some free sugars with NSS would not be beneficial for someone trying to increase calorie deficit and lose weight.
Think it's one of these things where the expected effect size is small and the measured output is multicausal, so observational studies simply won't be powerful enough to observe any real impact.
“NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health.” The classic public health advice: "Be More Virtuous." Correct, but not always maximally practical.
If anything, it reflects a greater degree of logical rigor:
1) It's commonly taken as a simple fact that overrepresentation of white people among e.g. the top hedge fund managers is evidence of society being structured in those people's favor
2) Jews are way more overrepresented among top hedge fund managers than non-Jewish whites
3) ...
Obviously the missing piece here is that (taken as a whole; obviously "Jews" comprises many different groups) Jewish people, on average, are culturally and genetically predisposed to success in intellectual fields. However, if you notice this but grow up in a climate where cultural and genetic reasons for group success are verboten, the nefarious explanations are the ones left.
There's no logical endpoint for "disparate group outcomes prove a problem that must be fixed" outside of discrimination against Asians and Jews. (It's an ineffective racist, white supremacist society that allows immigrant Asians and their descendants to outscore native whites on every metric of success used to prove the racism and white supremacy.)
I'm not sure what metrics you're using for "spent around the same amount," but from preliminary looks at AC Milan vs. Brighton that doesn't seem true at all.
Breaking things down into transfer vs wages: over the past two seasons, Brighton have a net transfer profit of ~80m euros per Transfermarkt, while AC Milan have spent ~110m net, so 190m difference. (Stretching back further, you get to some seasons of 60m net spend by Brighton while they were trying to get promoted, but this is during a time when AC Milan's ownership spent 100m+ net a few seasons.)
Now -- Brighton are shrewdly run, but I doubt it's sustainable for any club to consistently show the kind of short-term player trading profit that Cucurella + whatever they get for Caicedo and Mac Allister represent. Given the owner's background, I would expect Brighton to continue to be solidly above-average, but other clubs have data analysts and scouts and such too (and are capable of just copying Brighton's strategy inasmuch as it's reverse-engineerable from outcomes).
Stretching things out over multiple seasons and netting the expenses off makes things look a bit better, but only obscures the fact that they did spend big, they're just operating in a big-spending league. It's no small feat to compete in that league, but to say they have "conquered" the transfer market after half a season having splashed out what they did is declaring victory a bit prematurely.
It's a little bit harder to compare by looking at Brighton's wage bill in GBP but Milan's in EUR. After conversion to EUR we get:
Milan - €169m
Brighton - €123m
So a team currently who have never finished higher than ninth in the Premier League have a wage bill that is 72% that of the reigning Serie A champions (not to mention seven-time European Cup winner who have won their domestic league nineteen times). They may not (yet? these figures are from 2021) have a higher wage bill than a current giant of the European game, but they're certainly within the same ballpark.
Oh, transfermarkt is perfectly fine, and your general point about EPL money is definitely right -- just don't think it makes any sense to count pure transfer outlay without taking into account player sales.
You aren't "spending big" if you're spending 55m out of player trading revenue of 130m; you are (maybe) if you're spending 50m out of player trading revenue of 15m.
Yeah I just wanted to show how despite being a smaller club punching above their weight locally, they still had a chunk of resources to spend that would put them among the elite even in the big five European leagues. I don't know if net player spend is a particularly good way to look at that either, but the wage bills you posted were pretty interesting. I didn't think that kind of info would be easily accessible.
It's nice to encounter people who want to talk football on HN though :)
This overestimates the role of international soccer in predicting future international soccer success. Players get 99% of their development with their club teams. While it is crucial for Americans to regularly play good teams, this experience is mostly going to happen in top European leagues and the Champions League.
And we're in the midst of a huge boom period for Americans in Europe, with young Americans playing regularly for perennial Champions League teams Dortmund, Barcelona, Chelsea, Juventus, and Leipzig, a handful of starters on quality teams behind them, and major European teams spending more and more resources scouting American prospects.
Player quality is the main driver of international success: Belgium went from 57th-ranked in 2010 to 1st-ranked in 2015 (yes, FIFA rankings are bad, but they point to something real) not because of some change in scheduling philosophy but because they had a bunch of great players in 2015.
Belgium has not one but two players named Hazard, a Mertens, a Lukaku, a Tielemens, just to name a few. It's not surprising they've jumped in the standings with a squad like that. They also have Martinez as a coach.
Just look at the recent fixture list of the USMNT[0]. I'm really not meaning to offend, but these are not soccer power house types of squads they are facing.
The USMNT has a long long way to go. As long as there competition with American Throwball, basketball, baseball, etc, the US will suffer this level of mediocrity as the money potential just isn't there.
I do like your nomenclature of "American Throwball", I might use that one in the future.
This is the unfortunate truth, IMO. As long as football is a distant fourth or fifth in American sports priorities, I don't see a reality where it excels. Why would it, when the athletes who could probably do amazing go to the other sports where they make 20x as much at a minimum, but more likely 200x as much?
Given the current trajectory of things, I simply don't see it changing either. Without some sort of black swan event either seriously incentivizing football or disincentivizing the other sports, there is no immediate path to the traction necessary to make football popular enough in the States for the USMNT to be a world class player in the next few decades.
The fact that MLS came out with an ad campaign shouting themselves as the 5th Major Sport was such an abysmal PR campaign, that I just cannot ever respect them after the fact.
They are literally celebrating the fact that they are not EPL, they are not Championship, they are not League 1 and on down the line. WTF! were they thinking that self deprecation was going to work at that level???!!!! You know, when you're bored with NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, there's us little guys called MLS. No, you're not trying to buy a house, we're a real sports league. For reality not for realty!!!
Yeah, this has been one of the most disappointing things for me. No way his shtick has fooled all of them.
Pg in particular I would've expected more rigor from, but maybe that's naivete, or the inevitable awkwardness that comes from him living both in the world of high epistemic standards (his essays) and zero epistemic standards with rampant dishonesty (startup/VC culture). To me, the latter undermines the former, but I also am not a rich thought leader.
In my very honest opinion, pg's essays, with some brilliant exceptions, are at the level of analysis that would be considered exceptional for a middle school student, average for a high school student, and "why are you wasting my time with platitudes" for a grad student.
But when I published my essays, I have 5 readers including my mother, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
It's only a double standard if you're assuming the people critical of Lambda aren't also critical of selling valueless $200k college educations to checked-out students.
1) People definitely did get away with this, all the time. Historically, researchers had no obligation (at least that was practically enforced) to maintain and share their data and code. Peer review would check for specific methodological flaws and nothing deeper. If someone emailed you about your 1995 study in 2005, you'd say "I no longer have the code," or, more likely, simply never email them back.
2) In a highly competitive landscape where cheating is effective, the "winners" will be heavily selected for willingness to maximize the use of cheating. Even if only 1% of the population is willing to commit explicit fraud, that 1% is going to be heavily overrepresented in a world where explicit fraud gets you the top-tier publications that bring you to prominence.
3) Ariely and Gino both made millions of dollars from their fraud that they will not have to give back. It's worth emphasizing how poorly Ariely's fraud was executed -- he did the laziest possible fraud and easily converted it into money and prestige.
4) Related to the first point, it's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted since the '08-'12 time period. The replication crisis was just kicking into gear, and only among people who were paying attention to that type of thing. Ariely didn't come up reading Andrew Gelman's blog. There's simply far more light on any paper today than there would've been 10 years ago -- statistical and methodological understanding have come a long way as cohorts of academics came up in the shadow of the replication crisis. Having established credible groups like Data Colada to centralize these analyses has also been a big deal; tenured profs can't bully Data Colada by threatening their career progression the same way they could if accused via email by a random grad student.