Was this the kind of reputation damage you were expecting?
More ‘anything gwern says is a lie and his emails should be ignored and anyone reading his stuff be told he is a self-confessed liar’. (I don’t think this is a fair appraisal, since I just wrote the lie up in exhaustive detail, and I only falsified 1 out of 9 results for ~3 days while keeping it as low-key as possible. I could have sent the fake results to Roberts privately, but then his assent or dissent would not be as credible as compared to actually posting it or not.)
For what it’s worth, I actually had intended to post this as an Article and not a Discussion if Roberts did fail, but only as a Discussion if he passed. Then I realized this was a publication bias—giving higher billing to positive findings—which leads to confirmation bias, so I resolved to post it as a Discussion no matter the result.
Upon reading this, I categorized it with “Towards a progressive hermeneutics of quantum gravity” in the deception department (though not in the ‘should have been easily caught’ department) - the lie was temporary, used as a delicate test of someone else’s honesty, and has probably earned you an enemy and gotten a bunch of other people to trust you less.
Speaking of which, it would be best if you could avoid gratuitous deception (like, if you do something like the volunteer experiment, use the data in all cases but neglect to inform half the cohort).
More ‘anything gwern says is a lie and his emails should be ignored and anyone reading his stuff be told he is a self-confessed liar’. (I don’t think this is a fair appraisal, since I just wrote the lie up in exhaustive detail, and I only falsified 1 out of 9 results for ~3 days while keeping it as low-key as possible. I could have sent the fake results to Roberts privately, but then his assent or dissent would not be as credible as compared to actually posting it or not.)
For what it’s worth, I actually had intended to post this as an Article and not a Discussion if Roberts did fail, but only as a Discussion if he passed. Then I realized this was a publication bias—giving higher billing to positive findings—which leads to confirmation bias, so I resolved to post it as a Discussion no matter the result.
Upon reading this, I categorized it with “Towards a progressive hermeneutics of quantum gravity” in the deception department (though not in the ‘should have been easily caught’ department) - the lie was temporary, used as a delicate test of someone else’s honesty, and has probably earned you an enemy and gotten a bunch of other people to trust you less.
Speaking of which, it would be best if you could avoid gratuitous deception (like, if you do something like the volunteer experiment, use the data in all cases but neglect to inform half the cohort).