It sounds like a headline ripped from a supermarket tabloid: In 1994, three Israeli researchers claimed to have found a secret code embedded in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.
But this wasn’t junk science.
Ahhhh . . . but it was!
The Times continues:
The paper in which they revealed their findings appeared in an esteemed, peer-reviewed journal. And the academic reputations of the three authors — Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg and Doron Witztum — were unimpeachable, especially that of Dr. Rips.
The reporter’s mistake was to think that, just cos something’s authored by professors at a legitimate journal and published in a reputable journal, that it can’t be junk science.
An understandable mistake to make in 1994, but hard to support nowadays. Lucky golf ball, anyone?
P.S. I remember talking with Dave Krantz a couple years after that Bible code paper came out. Some of his colleagues were really bothered by it and went to the trouble of figuring out and explaining what was going on. Dave was kind of irritated that they were wasting any time on it at all, and I just thought the whole thing was a big joke.
In retrospect I think Dave and I should’ve shown more respect to the debunkers. The Bible code paper was an early example of junk science leveraging the authority of the academic community to get publicity.
The junk-science-to-journal-to-NPR/Ted pipeline must have seemed like a great deal for everyone at the time: more publicity for researchers, more credibility for unconventional scientific claims, more fun feature stories for the news media. And for awhile it seemed to be going just fine, turning Malcolm Gladwell into a New Yorker celebrity, powering the Freakonomics franchise, and providing raw material for Jeffrey Epstein’s Edge Foundation. The Pizzagate and Shreddergate researchers became wildly successful, and even fringe players such as the beauty-and-sex-ratio guy were able to land book contracts. Formerly obscure law professors got to mingle with Henry Kissinger! It was boom time in This Week in Psychological Science.
Eventually the weight of the junk science overwhelmed the system, and ultimately I think that the whole thing was a bit of a deal with a devil: In the short term, academic social science got lots of publicity, and a few well-placed and credulous or unscrupulous professors became media stars. In the medium term, academic journals justly lost much of their authority. In the longer term, who knows.
I have never heard of this celebrated person:
“turning Malcolm Glawell into a New Yorker celebrity”
I presume Malcolm GlaDwell is the (yet once more) intended target, but then again, I could not imagine buying Greenland either.
Typo fixed; thanks.
Here is a video purporting to explain Bible codes
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-fc-5615&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-5615&hspart=fc¶m1=7¶m2=eJwtjk2OwjAMha%2BSJSOR1HaSpqWr8tMDjFgNYoHaUkVAg1oKiNOPUyFZ9vP7LPl1vjkUx98tAlit88Py2PNOBBZYR8aj5pHnEfp7pOAUkVVoUoWW2O7awP40spxOrG7h46%2FXU2IViMXL9014jaJ%2FCAQFhWAjNYV4xzY8V6i1gh%2FRtfUlJAScBAHF2Q%2FtObyTmcbPo%2F%2BmmcZ2mLVzZZXpDci1dZVE3FUyL4kkVilm5EqHpYn3dTOHJiORJGR7TFdouJQl8%2FcPTZFHlg%3D%3D&p=bible+code+using+english&type=fc_A26C40E4505_s58_g_e_d_n22050_c999#id=2&vid=43420ee159bc64e30637d188535f35ea&action=view
It is over 49 minutes long and spends a great deal of effort explaining the (in)famous Monte Hall problem and relating it to Bible codes. Lots of other “statistical significance” numbers cited.
Here is another
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-fc-5615&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-5615&hspart=fc¶m1=7¶m2=eJwtjk2OwjAMha%2BSJSOR1HaSpqWr8tMDjFgNYoHaUkVAg1oKiNOPUyFZ9vP7LPl1vjkUx98tAlit88Py2PNOBBZYR8aj5pHnEfp7pOAUkVVoUoWW2O7awP40spxOrG7h46%2FXU2IViMXL9014jaJ%2FCAQFhWAjNYV4xzY8V6i1gh%2FRtfUlJAScBAHF2Q%2FtObyTmcbPo%2F%2BmmcZ2mLVzZZXpDci1dZVE3FUyL4kkVilm5EqHpYn3dTOHJiORJGR7TFdouJQl8%2FcPTZFHlg%3D%3D&p=bible+code+using+english&type=fc_A26C40E4505_s58_g_e_d_n22050_c999#id=22&vid=bf0df72478b510cf6d0557002fca0919&action=view
It’s Monty, not Monte.
Paul:
I’d like to take a charitable view here and say that every hour spent by some credulous person researching the Bible code using internet videos is an hour not spent watching Alex Jones videos . . . but sometimes I have a horrible feeling that these different sorts of fraud and confusion feed upon each other. I don’t know.
That time can be better spent by watching any rerun of ‘The Rockford Files’ with James Garner (Amazon Prime) if only for the ubiquitous car chase scene that dots every episode.
BTW, my sister is a retired professor of Biblical Studies and thinks that all this stuff is total hogwash (she had a more graphical term)
Alan:
When I was a kid I absolutely loved the Rockford Files, especially the first third of every show where as a viewer I was completely lost and had to figure out what was going on. I watched a few episodes recently, and . . . they were OK, and Garner remains charming, but the last third of each episode really dragged. Once you know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and you know that Jim will be all right in the end, that last bit is just too boring. In contrast, old Columbo episodes still seem very watchable to me, even though on the whole I find Garner’s shtick to be more entertaining than Falk’s. I have no idea how watchable I’d find an old episode of Kojak or whatever.
Regarding your final sentence: Yes, of course that Bible code is total hogwash: no degree in biblical studies is needed to realize that!
Andrew,
I’d score Rockford and Columbo as close to a tie. The latter had the advantage of producing one fourth the shows which did help keep the batting average up. Rockford arguably had the edge on showrunners with Cannell, Bartlett, and a very young David Chase splitting the duties and with Huggins setting the tone in the first season. You can see Chase experimenting with some of the themes that would show up in the Sopranos decades later.
Rockford was unique when it came out, a deliberate effort to subvert the standard TV detective tropes and though it had plenty of imitators (Magnum, Simon and Simon to name a few), no one came close to the original. By comparison, the once gritty and realistic Kojak has aged badly because we’ve seen these stories done so much better since then. Savalas remains as charismatic as ever, but if you try to watch it now, it’s just another 70s cop show.
Mark:
Perhaps it’s just that Rockford was aimed at kids (lots of fights, car chases, etc.) and Columbo was aimed at adults (more sedate, also many of the villains were pretty old), so it makes sense that I liked Rockford more when I was a kid and I prefer Columbo now that I’m an oldster.
I guess Barny Miller has to just be considered as a different genre entirely even as it overlaps some and was from a similar time frame. I find that sitcoms rarely age well, but I want to watch a few episodes to see if it’s an outlier in that regard.
Try watching N.Y.P.D. (1967-1969). Is it available somewhere?
I recently found Dan “Shreddergate” Ariely’s “The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty” in a thrift store. Which meant I could buy it without any money going to Ariely. My only hesitation was a vague sense that it belonged right where it was, about a foot away from a hardback copy of Rudy Guiliani’s book “Leadership.”
I feel like this book might be the nadir of the age-of-anything-goes in social science. It’s not just that it is based almost entirely on fraudulent research (Gino is mentioned and cited numerous times throughout). Or that the fraudulent results are dressed up with pages of just-so stories that have little to do with the bad research. It’s more the way Ariely taunts the reader from his bully pulpit:
“Like your average mugger, we all seek our own advantage as we make our way through the world. Whether we do this by robbing banks or writing books is inconsequential to our rational calculations of cost and benefits.” (page 4)
The taunting appears throughout Ariely’s writings. In April 2024 he posted on his blog one long taunt under the heading of “In Defense of Mistakes.” The subject “mistake” was the amateurish fabrication of the data for the car insurance study about signing at the top versus at the bottom of a written form. Ariely first twists the debacle into an unrecognizable shape:
“I have also spent the better part of the past three years reliving a set of decisions I made and actions I took over a decade ago, around a now-infamous study of human behavior using car insurance data. Working in partnership with trusted colleagues, I did what was expected and right at the time.”
Fraud may very well have been “expected.” He was working with Gino in 2012, and the interventions they were working with were goofy, yet always somehow yielded p<.001. Later in the post he doubles down on the taunt:
"For my part, I am planning on many more years of mistakes. […] I intend to continue to make my own mistakes, and I even hope to normalize making more of them."
I underlined all the places in the book where Ariely confesses to his own dishonesty, always in the context of how everyone else is at least as bad. I do hope someone from the IRS sees his confessions about cheating on his taxes. And no, Dan, it is not true that we all cheat on our taxes, of that I am certain.
Matt:
Interesting. I’ve heard that muggers have impulse-control problems, but I don’t really know. Regarding Ariely, yeah, it’s funny how there seems to be this fine line between taunting and confession.
Robbing banks in fact has an atrocious “calculations of cost and benefits.”. According to the FBI, the average amount is $4,213 :
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/robbery
Writing books may not do much better in terms of average amount, but the criminality involved is usually metaphorical. Usually.
It’s certainly much easier to become a rich professor by hyping junk research, versus robbing a bank for an equal amount. Though both are overall very rare outcomes among the total population which might be interested in making such an attempt.
Compared to these, becoming a rich professor by consulting for a party in a regulatory proceeding – not by hyping but by presenting a biased view, devoid of appropriate caveats, but with glowing credentials – is both easier and not so rare (unfortunately).
WTF, I remember my professor (Barry Simon) in college having all sorts of publications debunking this shit back in the 90s.
Though it’s at least useful to see how journals handle publications that are shown to be total scientific garbage and whose statistical arguments are debunked. Seems like they weren’t withdrawn. That’s a perfectly reasonable choice (only unpublish if there was something like fraud) but it gives the lie to all those journals who revoke a publication when it turns controversial with some kind of excuse about how they just discovered it was low quality or whatever.
I’m not sure I agree that this situation is about the junk science overwhelming the system. Journals are written off the subject matter experts to read and to record their work for future generations. Any subject matter expert searching for material on the bible code wouldn’t be tricked into thinking the bible code was reputable — they would have seen a few publications and a bunch of rebutalls.
So the academic journals seem to have done their job. The actual experts the journals are targeted at aren’t misinformed and the debate gets recorded so the rebutalls are there when it pops up again. The error was seeing publication in a journal as sufficient evidence of being non-bullshit rather than the public record of an ongoing discussion.
But this is a mistake the journalists will keep making which is why I’m pushing so hard for all publications to trigger an automatic publication for the best rebuttal submitted in a year to be published besides the original.
This may true for the actual experts though they can be fooled, but there are many others who read and act on papers published in academic journals. I have been one.
I have very rarely done any “original” research but I have often based parts of applied work or recommendations on the journal papers. My work has, in a very small way, contributed to government decision-making. I am sure that there are thousands of government and private industry individuals around the world who make decisions and policy recommendations based on journal articles.
An extreme example of this is the Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s 2010 paper Growth in a Time of Debt which had serious economic policy effects in a number of countries. How much nudge work may have been based on Dan Ariely’s work?
A rather horrifying example is Andrew Wakefield”s fraudulent paper on the MMR vaccine[1] that, taken up by fanatical anti-vaxers that massively led to increased vaccine resistance. In this case, the scientific malpractice and fraud was reveled by an investigative journalist, Brian Deer not by the experts.
Wakefield was struck off for this, and the last I heard was living in the USA. Possibly he wishes to avoid meeting former colleagues in the UK. He remains a hero to the anti-vax movement, at least in the USA.
[1] Wakefield A, Murch S, Anthony A, et al. (1998). “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children”. The Lancet. 351 (9103): 637–41. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(97)11096-0
But that raises the question of whether it is appropriate to ask journals to also serve the function of educating the general public.
I tend to think trying to have one type of publication that does both inevitably leads to problems because you then need to take extra care with things that might confuse the public which ultimately leads to a failure of both the public education and epistemic missions.
In the future? Just look at the Periphery, where junk science allies with the media and the political right to silence real scientists. This has been the case in Albania, for example, where political agendas to counter Serbian nationalism in the 1980s were fed into linguistics and Albanian studies in general. It transitioned into junk science in the media in the era of liberalisation, and hijacked academia as government funds dwindled. Hopefully the Center is far less sensitive to such interventions and events.