To be honest, I discount anything with Hauser’s name attached, unfair though that might be to his poor grad students. And I particularly discount anything with Hauser’s name which did not go through normal peer review.
Marc Hauser is a Harvard psychologist, one of the best known experimental psychologists practicing today, with a remarkable publication record. Trouble is, some of his data was fake. Scuttlebutt is that his grad students finally had enough and forced the university to act. Good for them.
LessWrong people may be interested in Hauser since most “Trolley problem” experimental research you have seen here has his signature on it. Hauser’s humiliation has led to humorous handwringing from bloggers who know him and poorly disguised glee from bloggers who don’t like him
Is there any reason to be worried about his work other than the fairly subjective coding of animal and infant behavior? Yes, I would expect that to correlate with fraud in other experiments, but I would also expect fraud in experiments like this one to be easily detected in the actual investigation, and that doesn’t seem to have happened.
I don’t know. But I do suspect that most scientific fraud takes place at the research-design stage. There is enormous pressure to publish, pressure to graduate. It takes integrity to resist that pressure. Hauser really does have a remarkable record of publication, even after you subtract the ones that he was forced to retract because the results could not be replicated or in which data was clearly faked.
What do you think? Would you trust cutting edge, glamorous research from this man? A guy who has been involved in glamorous research so many times before. And Saxe as the other senior researcher in this paper. Wow, someone who has been invited to do TED lectures. These people are true rock-stars among scientists.
To be honest, I discount anything with Hauser’s name attached, unfair though that might be to his poor grad students. And I particularly discount anything with Hauser’s name which did not go through normal peer review.
Can you give some context for this remark? I don’t think I’ve heard of Hauser.
Marc Hauser is a Harvard psychologist, one of the best known experimental psychologists practicing today, with a remarkable publication record. Trouble is, some of his data was fake. Scuttlebutt is that his grad students finally had enough and forced the university to act. Good for them.
LessWrong people may be interested in Hauser since most “Trolley problem” experimental research you have seen here has his signature on it. Hauser’s humiliation has led to humorous handwringing from bloggers who know him and poorly disguised glee from bloggers who don’t like him
Is there any reason to be worried about his work other than the fairly subjective coding of animal and infant behavior? Yes, I would expect that to correlate with fraud in other experiments, but I would also expect fraud in experiments like this one to be easily detected in the actual investigation, and that doesn’t seem to have happened.
I don’t know. But I do suspect that most scientific fraud takes place at the research-design stage. There is enormous pressure to publish, pressure to graduate. It takes integrity to resist that pressure. Hauser really does have a remarkable record of publication, even after you subtract the ones that he was forced to retract because the results could not be replicated or in which data was clearly faked.
What do you think? Would you trust cutting edge, glamorous research from this man? A guy who has been involved in glamorous research so many times before. And Saxe as the other senior researcher in this paper. Wow, someone who has been invited to do TED lectures. These people are true rock-stars among scientists.