1. Scientists
A couple weeks ago we talked about the problem of scientists writing things that they know are false but not thinking about it as lying. The examples I gave were:
– A paper on the cumulative effects of violent video games that was described in its title as “long-term” but actually was conducted over 3 days. Not long-term at all.
– A paper that had in its abstract: “That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications,” even though it had no evidence of anyone actually becoming more powerful.
As I wrote at the time, what bothers me isn’t so much that the wrapping of these papers didn’t accurately describe their content, so much as it seemed pretty clear that the authors involved never even saw the problem.
In the immortal words of Michael Kinsley, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal.” And, as promised, I continue to scream about it.
2. Doctors
It’s not just scientists who say things that there’s no way they believe. Recall this amazing court testimony from “Kenneth Ludmerer, M.D., a Washington University professor of medicine and medical history, who had a sideline in consulting for the cigarette industry:
Ludmerer made this statement in 2002. At some level, ya gotta admire someone who’s willing to make a statement that will make him appear to outsiders as either a liar or a fool. Ludmerer reportedly received over half a million dollars for his testimony, but I can’t believe he needed the money. Cost of living in St. Louis is, like, nothing, and I have a feeling Wash U. already pays him pretty well.
It seems that, just like the scientists quoted in part 1 of this post, Ludmerer felt he was playing by the rules. It was ok for him to say something that was obviously untrue, because . . . ummm, because that’s what people do, I guess.
Interlude: Reckless disregard for the truth
In my post, I asked what do you call it when someone is lying but they’re doing it in such a socially-acceptable way that nobody ever calls them on it? Some commenters suggested the term “bullshit,” but that didn’t quite seem right to me, because these people seemed pretty deliberate in their factual misstatements. I’m going with commenter Raphael’s suggestion, “reckless disregard for the truth.” The “disregard for the truth” part is obvious; the “reckless” is because someone might actually read the title or abstract of your paper or hear your testimony and take it seriously.
3. Cops
This story was reported all over, for example here’s Ezra Klein in the New York Times:
The Department of Homeland Security says Lander was “arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer,” a lie so brazen, given that this is all on tape for everyone to see, that it makes the whole episode even more chilling.
And Philip Bump in the Washington Post:
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander . . . was detained outside a New York courtroom as he pressed immigration officers to present an arrest warrant for a man they were taking into custody. Video from the scene shows Lander attempting to stay in physical contact with the immigrant being detained until the officers forcibly took him into custody. . . . the Department of Homeland Security announced that Lander would also be charged with “assaulting law enforcement.” . . . a review of the video of the incident makes it hard to imagine why assault charges were even on the table. Lander — literally and aesthetically the city’s accountant — assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.
And what about that bit where the cop was hiding his face under a ski mask?
Bump looks into the matter in an article entitled, “Parsing ICE’s mixed-up, hard-to-believe assault claims”:
Last month, I [Bump] wrote a column questioning why Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were increasingly disguising their identities as they conducted sweeps and arrests. One obvious answer was that they hoped to avoid accountability for their actions. . . .
The acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, took the time to respond to my column in a letter to this newspaper. He lamented my allegedly having disparaged his officers during National Police Week, insisting that officers were covering their faces for their own safety. He noted that a man in Texas faced criminal charges for threatening ICE officers and claimed that “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
So what happened? Bump continues:
Given that it is no longer National Police Week, I assume Mr. Lyons will have no objection to my digging into his claims a bit more robustly.
I [Bump] emailed ICE multiple times asking where the 413 percent claim came from and whether there were news reports about the assaults it was tallying. I got no response, so I endeavored to figure out where the figures came from myself.
We should begin by noting that the 413 percent figure — mentioned in a DHS social media post about Lander on Tuesday — has been deployed by DHS since early May. In a post from mid-April, the figure was 300 percent, suggesting that some recalculation had been undertaken. If that’s the case, though, either the number of assaults since early May has been steady or DHS hasn’t bothered to update the figure even as their officers have been deployed much more broadly in an effort to increase immigrant arrests.
Here I will point out that Customs and Border Protection offers monthly data on the number of assaults on its officers. The year-to-date total is 20 percent lower than it was in 2024.
I was able to find Justice Department and DHS news releases documenting a number of assaults against ICE officers since January — assaults targeting 12 individuals. . . . For context, ICE announced in April that it had conducted 66,463 arrests since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
Importantly, most of the assaults documented with indictments or news releases occurred as immigrants were being detained. One officer was elbowed in the face; two others were injured when a target’s vehicle struck their own as he was trying to escape. Considered along with the assaults that occurred at ICE facilities, you will notice a pattern: Officers hiding their identities wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the assaults from occurring. . . .
Again, no assault on law enforcement is warranted nor are threats against law enforcement. It is also undoubtedly the case that there have been assaults against immigration officers that have not been publicly reported or where criminal charges are pending.
That said, we should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value. That the organization would not provide evidence for its claims, that it has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators and that it conflates assaults of officers engaged in official acts with putative threats to them personally all diminishes the extent to which we should grant ICE the benefit of the doubt.
Here’s another news article, this one by Sam Adams, talking about the toxic stew produced by mixing reckless disregard for the truth with a lack of consequences even for demonstrated lies:
Allowing agents to mask indiscriminately doesn’t just protect them; it also risks emboldening them to stretch the boundaries of the law. We’re already aware of the risk of allowing law enforcement agents to act anonymously–that’s why police officers have badge numbers. . . .
After Lander was arrested (he was released later in the afternoon), DHS official Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement accusing him of “assaulting law enforcement.” This echoed the incident last week when California Sen. Alex Padilla was thrown to the ground and handcuffed after he’d shouted out his name and attempted to ask Kristi Noem a question during a press conference. DHS accused of him of “lung[ing]” toward Noem, despite numerous videos showing that he did nothing of the sort.
I assume that the government official who described Lander as assaulting law enforcement even though he didn’t assault law enforcement will experience the same consequences as the researcher who described a 3-day study as long term and the doctor–the professor of medicine!–who said he had “no opinion” on whether cigarette smoking contributes to the development of lung cancer in human beings. Those consequences being: some people criticize them in the press and social media (as here!), and . . . that’s all!
4a. Why do they do it?
One reason to lie is that you don’t have good arguments on your side. Or, maybe you have ok arguments on your side, but not good enough. So if you add some fake evidence, it makes your case stronger.
Saying you did a 3-day study of video games, that’s not so impressive. “Long term” sounds much better. Sure, you have to mislead, but it makes your case stronger!
Saying that, yeah, everybody knows that smoking causes lung cancer but you still think people should have the freedom to promote cigarette sales however they want, that doesn’t sound so good. Saying that you, as a medical-school processor, have no opinion on whether cigarette smoking contributes to the development of lung cancer in human beings–that’s pretty impressive! I can only assume he didn’t believe it–i.e., he was lying–but that’s secondary to his goal of making a strong case.
Saying that you sent masked officers to arrest some opposition-party politicians who were at no point posing a threat to anybody . . . ummm, that sounds pretty bad, kind of authoritarian even! But if they were committing “assault” and “lunging” at the officers, that’s another story. It’s a false story, but that’s the point! The motivation for lying is that it makes your case sound stronger.
4b. How does it work?
OK, fine, but the above reasoning is not enough. After all, if you lie and nobody believes you, it doesn’t do the trick. So the next thing you need is a medium of communication that will propagate your lies.
Scientists can do this using scientific journals. Sometimes journals are pretty picky, but sometimes they’ll publish anything! At least, if you write the paper in the standard style and you include some statistically-significant p-values, then you can slip just about anything into the title and abstract and it will get through.
The doctor who said that stupid thing about smoking and cancer . . . that happened in court, he was questioned on it, maybe that didn’t work out so well for him. I can’t believe his testimony was very effective to anyone.
The government statements falsely accusing Lander of “assaulting law enforcement” and Padilla of “lunging” . . . these lies get spread on social media, in the partisan news media, and even in the nonpartisan media when they repeat the official statements.
4c. Standard operating procedure
Again, a key way that this “reckless disregard for the truth” thing” works is that it’s accepted. I don’t even think the people saying these false statements recognize them as lies. They function as terms of art. In social psychology, “long term” can mean whatever you want it to mean, and “instantly become more powerful” is just something you get to say, even if you have no measures of power. In legal consulting, you can just say something you don’t believe. And when the cops say “assaulting” or “lunging,” what that really means is that they don’t like you, that’s all. Yes, some people like me and those news reporters quoted above will object, but we’re outsiders and we don’t really count.
Indeed, the fact that the reckless disregard for the truth is so public–for example, saying “long term” when it’s right there in the article that it’s 3 days, or someone was “assaulting” or “lunging” in contradiction of direct video evidence–makes it clearer than ever that it’s accepted behavior in science, legal testimony, and law enforcement.
4d. Lack of consequences
So, yeah, why not show reckless disregard for the truth if (a) it helps you make your case, (b) you have captive media that will pass along your lies, (c) it’s such common practice that you don’t have to feel bad about it, and (d) you face no professional consequences other than the occasional angry columnist or blogger shouting into the void? Why not, indeed?
At this point a perceptive reader may have noticed an internal contradiction in my argument.
On one hand, I’m saying this deplorable behavior is common, it’s accepted, and there are lots of incentives to do it, to the extent that when the cops say someone’s resisting arrest or a social psychologist says he did a long-term study, we should know not to believe it–at least, not when the evidence in front of our goddam face contradicts it.
On the other hand, if, as Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed, Everybody knows that the boat is leaking, Everybody knows that the captain lied,” etc., then why does it matter? Can we just renormalize all the untruthful statements and return to where we should be?
My answer is no, because not everybody lies. Some of us are very careful with our words! But in a form of Gresham’s Law, liars win. At least in the short term, it’s easier to make a compelling argument if you’re willing to make shit up. And it’s very hard to argue against someone who’s willing to make shit up, partly because you have to waste a lot of your time pushing against the shit and partly because anyone who’s willing to make up shit might also be willing to do other underhanded things.
Another way of saying it is that lying is a negative-sum action: it might help you win the debate right now, or help you get that umpteenth publication on your resume or get on NPR or Freakonomics or Ted, it might help you get through a news cycle–but it’s also degrading public discourse, it’s adding noise to the communication channel. The same with the cops: if everyone assumes the secret police agency is going to lie, that makes it harder for the police officials who, for whatever reason, feel bound to the truth in their public statements.
And all the others who accept this behavior, who say Not my problem or But the general point is correct or But the other side does it too . . . all those bystanders are part of the problem by tipping the incentives toward more reckless disregard for the truth.
I can hardly ask the authors of junk-science papers and greedy legal consultants and sleazy official spokespeople to stop what they’re doing. But I can ask the rest of you to stop tolerating it.
Here’s another well-known big example. In the initial discussions among a small panel of experts chosen to evaluate the origins of Covid it was pretty clear which way they were leaning. E.g. Kristian Andersen, who was to be lead author on their paper, wrote “the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” After some discussion of the importance of politics, their published story said the opposite, and for a long time that insincere version dominated the public discourse. In polite conventional circles it still does.
Why can’t an expert update their opinion as they learn more about the specific details of a situation? Why is an expert’s first impression more credible than a revised more informed one?
Sure, that can easily happen, but not usually in the course of a few days in the absence of any known new evidence. That’s especially so right after the expert makes remarks like “I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.” and “Destroy the world based on sequence data. Yay or nay?”
A month after the publication of the new alleged conclusion the same lead author wrote ““I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved. If culture was involved, then the prior completely changes …What concerns me here are some of the comments by Shi in the SciAm article (“I had to check the lab”, etc.) and the fact that the furin site is being messed with in vitro. … no obvious signs of engineering anywhere, but that furin site could still have been inserted via gibson assembly (and clearly creating the reverse genetic system isn’t hard -the Germans managed to do exactly that for SARS-CoV-2 in less than a month.”
It’s hard to conclude that the published claim that no laboratory modification was plausible accurately reflected the views of its lead author.
Anderson explained why he changed his opinion in the NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fauci-kristian-andersen.html). Look before you leap.
Reply to John G W-
I’ve looked in substantially more detail than that old puff piece in the NY Times: https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v57
See in particular the extended sections on the Worobey and Pekar papers on which Andersen was a coauthor as well as the Proxima Origins paper on which he was the lead.
Concerning the Worobey paper, I woke up in the middle of one night realizing that its key statistic had the wrong sign:
https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021
(outside paywall: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08680)
Concerning the Pekar paper, regardless of whether the authors believed it at the time of publication, they have been willing to correct only a few of its massive math errors, not including an error in basic Bayesian logic whose correction changes the direction of the resulting odds.
Refusal to acknowledge unambiguous errors has a lot in common with what Andrew is discussing.
Yes, when it was first announced that the Covid investigation team was going to be led by the world‘s most prominent advocate for gain of function research, it was pretty clear from the beginning that we were not going to get anything resembling the truth. And we didn’t.
You can’t even call this a smart move by the Chinese government because it was so obviously corrupt.
Matt,
For a recent review on the origin of SAR CoV2, see https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-virology-093022-013037 From the abstract: “The available data clearly point to a natural zoonotic emergence within, or closely linked to, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.”
I think that misses a key part of Andrew’s point. It’s not just individual papers that can systematically go off the rails. There can be collective failures, especially when a group feels under attack and has members who may bear some responsibility for a major disaster. Virology is in that position.
John,
Another paper ridiculing the lab leak hypothesis, yawn. The entire paper is structured around this: “It seems untenable that SARS-CoV-2 would be first detected at the very location expected of a zoonotic virus—a live animal market—had it not emerged there.” No corresponding statement about the proximity to a bat coronavirus lab, no discussion of the questions surrounding patient zero, etc.
Rather than changing the subject, perhaps you could tell us why you think Peter Dascak was a good choice to represent western medicine on the investigation team, given that he had worked closely with the WIV lab director, Dr. Shi.
Matt –
> No corresponding statement about the proximity to a bat coronavirus lab,
What was the proximity?
@ 8 miles awaya 30 minute drive. What’s your opinion on how the virus got from the lab to the market, miles away, in a very large city, without clear signals of outbreaks elsewhere, like among lab workers, family and friends of lab workers, public transportation, hospitals where infected people might go, etc.?
Michael –
It’s unfortunate that you continue to lean into mind-probing to deduce that people are lying when they explain their opinions.
For all the serious effort you put in on this issue, that you continue to associate your effort with conspiracy-mongering is something I, for one, find confusing.
Of course conspiracies do happen, but that you promote this one so frequently, with such energy and certainty, shows that you’re more than willing to mix in poor epistemics with your high level analysis.
I think the connections to what Andrew is discussing are more far-reaching than you seem to understand.
Another species of lie: the valid inference based on an assumption that the liar knows is untrue. I am thinking of the guy who calculated that Biden’s odds of winning the swing states in 2020 was 1 in a quadrillion (and submitted a declaration to that effect in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election).
Gdanning:
Unfortunately, probability is so nonintuitive to people that we regularly see such ridiculous numbers, even when people have nothing to gain by putting those numbers out there; see for example the 10^{-90} thing mentioned here. So I’ll have to say that this “1 in a quadrillion” may well be pure innumeracy, i.e. the speaker doesn’t know that the claim is ridiculous.
He has a PhD in Economics, so I don’t think he has that excuse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Cicchetti
Gdanning:
The person who produced that 10^-90 number seems to have been a sociologist, but similarly innumerately extreme probability statements have been produced by Ph.D. economics.
Probability is hard, and just cos someone has a Ph.D. in a quantitative field, it doesn’t mean they’ll understand probability, any more than Michael Jordan’s basketball talent gave him the ability to hit a curveball.
“reckless disregard for the truth” seems a reasonable term of art for this kind of behavior. A question I have is: is the prevalence of reckless disregard for the truth worse now than it used to be? It certainly *feels* that way to me, but I can’t quite square whether or not that’s just a bias towards my own experience.
Amas:
Yeah, I dunno. For a long time the cops have been saying that people are resisting arrest or assaulting a police officer etc even when they probably weren’t. The difference now is that (a) we have direct video evidence, and (b) it’s not just the arresting officer or the local police chief who’s lying about it, it’s a national figure. U.S. government officials lying in cases where it’s super-obvious that they’re lying . . . unfortunately, that seems to be more common. As I’ve said before, it seems positively Stalinist. I used to say “Orwellian” but now that sounds too cute and fictional; “Stalinist” seems to more accurately capture the seriousness of the problem.
In science, I dunno, perhaps with increasing specialization of the social sciences, it has become more common for researchers within a subfield to use terms such as “long term” and “become more powerful” in ways that would make zero sense to English-speaking outsiders.
Yeah, the clear proof of non-truth seems to be an importantly different characteristic of today.
In the past, it seems that dishonest behavior often relied on existing trust in institutions. If people have a default trust in something like law enforcement, then bad actors can get away with dishonesty by relying on ambiguity and leaning on people’s existing trust to ‘get away with it’. It may erode trust, but the trust buffer exists enough to prevent any serious consequences.
Today, the tactics seem to have gone in the other direction: if people’s distrust in institutions goes far enough, it will roll over into apathy or despair over consequences. You don’t even need trust, you just need to convince enough people that consequences are impossible. Interestingly, the theater of the institution still exists. Even if clear evidence exists that a sitting US senator did not “lunge” at an administration official, a pretense needs to be provided so that the audience knows how they are supposed to react.
What happens as we move to a world where “clear evidence” no longer exists? The ease with which video evidence can be altered is staggering, and while some of it is easy to catch, the best is not – and the situation is likely to get more dire. So, when we have no “clear evidence” then non-truths can proliferate even further. Almost nothing will stand in the way. That blueprint seems to be working pretty well for the current administration. I assume everyone will learn the lesson that it works.
What’s the direct video evidence? All I could find is a video of what seems to be Lander resisting arrest, probably taken by his supporters some seconds *after* the alleged assault occurred. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/new-york-city-comptroller-mayoral-candidate-arrested-immigration-122943147
Keep in mind, too, that “assault” is a term of art. In the law, it means to threaten unwanted touching (and “battery” is unwanted touching). That’s quite different from its everyday meaning. If you push someone, you’ve committed assault. This makes it an everyday crime, probably every-hour for little boys. It means that selective prosecution is a big problem.
There is a whistle blower complaint against the Trump Justice department regarding some of the ‘questionable’ deportations (I am being charitable) and how lawyers sent to court were not being totally honest. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/us/politics/justice-department-emil-bove-trump-deportations-reuveni.html Bove is up for judicial appointment. I hope the Senators grill him at the confirmation hearing.
Regarding Andrew’s full post, I always go back to Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Proverbs for Paranoids’ that explain it all https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Proverbs_for_Paranoids particularly this one:
#3 – If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers
Trump’s lawyers weren’t just lying; they were lying to a judge who thought they were lying, and now he has the evidence. This one is going to get interesting.
The key metric is how often do people see the lies appear to “win”.
Great post. Being careful with one’s words can feel like a curse in academia. But self-respect is priceless!
Jessica:
Ahhh, but the trouble is that I don’t think these people think they’re lying! 3 days is “long term” if you call it that, “instantly becoming more powerful” is correct if you believe it to be so, “assaulting a police officer” is just a technical term for getting in the way of the cops, etc. These purveyors of misinformation are living in worlds where this is standard practice. So I doubt their self-respect is suffering one bit. Indeed, it’s likely that they consider themselves the victims, now that they’re being criticized for the sort of behavior that they’ve been taught is just fine.
And yet some people, when you point out the ridiculousness of what they are saying, will become more attentive, they just haven’t been exposed that kind of criticism before. But its perhaps not the most likely response.
Quote from above: “Being careful with one’s words can feel like a curse in academia.”
Might this be an interesting and useful blog post idea and title for you to ponder?
If I am not mistaken, I have heard you mention logic and reasoning in certain discussions here, and I think this deserves way more attention in education and academia. I wasn’t explicitly educated in such things at university if I remember correctly, which I find extremely strange. I find that so strange that I keep wondering whether I am remembering incorrectly or something like that.
I hope it’s okay for me to provide two titles, and two quotes from the papers, which might be interesting and/or useful in light of this all:
1) Mulnix, J. W. (2010). Thinking critically about critical thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1-16
“This appears to suggest that the fundamental concern of any critical thinking course ought to be teaching students to ‘grasp’ inferential or evidential connections.” (p. 11).
2) Sayers, D. L. (1947). The lost tools of learning. Paper read at a Vacation Course in Education, Oxford 1947
“Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think?” (p. 6)
Thanks for the recommendations, I will check them out. I find that strong logical-analytical reasoning skills are one of the key differentiators of great students (like being able to detect when a premise has been omitted or there is a missing logical link), but one of the hardest to detect in that they don’t necessarily correlate with the training or education one has had.
“The sole purpose of education is to be able to detect when a man is talking rot”
Misquoted from https://ritholtz.com/2010/11/the-sole-purpose-of-education/
Robin:
That’s a great quote, and it fits in well with my post from a few years ago, The social sciences are useless. So why do we study them? Here’s a good reason:.
Here’s the good reason I gave:
I think this topic is really important and appreciate this follow-up to the post from a couple of weeks ago. I like Rafael’s suggestion of “reckless disregard for the truth” because I think that phrasing moves away from making assumptions about the speaker (e.g., I think “lying” assumes bad faith). I might suggest “evidence” rather than “truth” to broaden when the phrase could be used. I think we more frequently can find evidence of disregard for “evidence” than we can disregard for “truth” (as I think we more often have objective evidence for phenomena than objective truth).
I think the big question is what does it look like for us to “stop tolerating it”? Here’s two recent examples that have been on my mind: (1) The commissioner (Dr. Peggy Carr) at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was fired this past February. The day after her firing, “The 74” published an article suggesting it was due to “NAEP Costs” but offered essentially no evidence that that was the reason and ignored other evidence (e.g., that OMB Director Russell Vought had said he wanted to put federal employees “in trauma”). (2) AEI Senior Fellow and former NCES Commissioner and former Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Director Mark Schneider recently posted an “AEIdeas” blog (which does not allow for comments) calling for the US to drop out of a couple of international education surveys. The majority of statements in the piece either lack evidence, are inaccurate, or are misleading.
I’m trying to think about what levers—if any—I have to call out (or stop tolerating) these types of reckless disregard for evidence that I come across. Does this mean starting a blog? Write a review paper on a grouped set of reckless postings?
Anyway, ideas on how to “stop tolerating it” would be welcome.
I think there’s an important distinction to be made between speech that’s intended to be informative and speech that’s intended to perform some function. Only some people, mostly scientists and journalists, believe that things you say should generally be true. Most people say things because saying them will accomplish something, like getting published, getting paid, or moving a social interaction to the next step.
Claiming to speak on behalf of the truth is a tricky business, because truth is tricky. I know, it’s not supposed to be. But then you study methods of seeking it, rules of evidence in court or statistical procedures in science or whatnot, and maybe you change your mind about that.
In this case, yes, good low-hanging fruit to be picked, in the name of truthseeking. Those rascally Republicans. We did not however listen to the other side’s complaints about falsehood. Are they saying to themselves, well, the Democrats lied about January 6 or Biden’s mental acuity. Fill in your preferred rhetoric here, e.g., I can’t ask Gelman to stop his games, but I can ask the rest of you to stop tolerating them.
When we choose where to posture on behalf of truth, we are likely to be posturing on behalf of falsehood.
Raywood:
I have no idea if that medical school professor mentioned above or the authors of those psychology papers are Republicans. I don’t even know if they’re “rascally.” I just know that they’re saying things in public that are obviously not true. The police spokespeople who lied about the arrests are Republicans, though, I can only assume. I don’t know if they’re “rascally”; they’re just doing that cop thing.
You write, “the Democrats lied about January 6.” What are you talking about? I mean, sure, there must be individual Democrats who have said things about January 6 that turned out not to be true, maybe even lied about it in the sense of saying things they knew were false at the time. But were official government spokespeople lying? It’s similar with the lying scientists: my problem is not just that they were lying but that they were doing so in serious scientific journals. Speaking more generally, yeah, it bothers me when people show reckless disregard for the truth, no matter what their political attitudes or affiliations.
You write, “I can’t ask Gelman to stop his games.” Why not? You can ask me to stop my games if you want! But first you’ll have to tell me what games you’re talking about. If it’s chess, sorry, I’m not gonna stop. But you can ask.
Finally, regarding your last sentence, I can’t speak for the “we” to whom you refer. I can just speak for me, and I assure you that I’m not “posturing” on behalf of anything.
I think you’re missing two essential reasons for lying: A lie can be a loyalty test. Anyone speaking out against a lie is an enemy in need of punishment. It can also be a demonstration of power. If nobody speaks out against a lie, but everyone knows it is a lie, then it is clear to everyone that the liar is too powerful to be challenged.
This also explains why some of the lies are so brazen: for it to work as a demonstration of power, it actually needs to be clear that it is a lie.
This isn’t a factor for the scientists or the doctors, but explains some of the actions within the Trump administration pretty well.
A recent blog post by Lior Pachter has a fascinating example of a (published) lie, a critique and exposition of the lie, and a feeble response to the critique. https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2025/06/16/reply-to-reply-to-false-positives-in-the-study-of-memory-related-gene-expression/
Pachter: “In only two pages containing 2,235 words the authors state 11 untruths… (and one truth…)”
If anyone can’t access the papers and wants them, reply and I’ll post them.
Raghu:
Interesting. I disagree with some of Pachter’s statements about statistical methods for multiple comparisons. I believe him that it is standard practice to perform multiple-testing corrections in genomics; I disagree with his statements about false discovery rate, false positives, etc. I think a Bayesian approach would work just fine.
I don’t think this affects Pachter’s main criticisms about the article he’s discussing; I just want to avoid a mistaken equating of classical hypothesis testing with statistical rigor.
Raghu and Andrew- I wish the internet was filled with little exchanges like yours.
This is a question I’ve been thinking a lot about since back in the 90s when I had an experience with a dean who was routinely dishonest and didn’t care whether or not you knew it. I’ve written about it occasionally since then, in particular wondering about the influence of Leo Strauss and his students. But now I think there’s something more.
Once routine, undisguised dishonesty is established in a community it not only provides a model for new liars to assume their role; it also changes the responses of those on the receiving end. At first, when people lie to you you may be outraged. As the lying becomes normalized, there is a tendency to become inured, maybe even see it as a sort of game or style of expression. I think that’s where we are now. A large portion of the US population thinks lying is pretty standard, maybe not 100% OK, but not disqualifying either. Sort of like cheating a bit on your taxes. Those videos of Lander being dragged down and yet accused of assaulting an officer? Well, that’s how people talk nowadays and, who knows, maybe it’s even true from time to time.
This is all speculation on my part, but it sure likes like it out there in the world. If I’m right, I wonder what the road back looks like, if there is a road back.
Should “Saying that you, as a medical-school processor” really be “Saying that you, as a medical-school professor” or was that the intent of the original?
Depends on which you think describes a modern university teacher:
“one who processes”
or
“one who professes”
I would add something else (perhaps “weasel words”) as a key feature of “how it happens”. What I mean specifically is the choice of vocabulary that might be defensible in a very narrow context but is inevitably misleading when read in any wider context. The paper on the cumulative effect of violent video games used “long-term” to contrast its findings with previous studies of immediate “short-term” (< 1 h) effects. So maybe the authors could argue that it's defensible in the narrowest possible sense _within the text of the paper_, and maybe they'd have a point. But elevating that terminology to the title or the abstract (at which point they become weasel words) is reckless disregard for the truth.
Using “long-term” to mean “up to three hours” is obviously very misleading, but I don’t know how much blame the authors deserve _if_ that is the standard terminology in their field.
How many times have we seen “we find that intervention A is significantly more effective than intervention B”, when in fact the difference is practically insignificant in spite of being “statistically significant”? (Many times, that’s how many).
If the only people who read this papers are people who are in the field, then this sort of misleading statement may not be very damaging, and at least arguably the perpetrators don’t deserve opprobrium. And how many people who don’t do academic studies about violence in video games are likely to read this study. (Not many, that’s how many. But Andrew did, so it’s not zero!)
It does make sense to distinguish between very short-term effects and those that last for, say, more than half an hour, even if even those “long-term” effects dissipate after a few hours. Let’s imagine I play a video game and get all amped up with adrenaline and also very frustrated when I lose, and that this makes me more prone to road rage when I go out to get groceries half an hour later. Or let’s imagine that the frustration ebbs after ten minutes and has no real-world effect. It’s not unreasonable to want to understand what is happening on those timescales. And if you call one of them “short-term”, what do you call the other one?
So, although I would like to see all papers written using words that mean what they say, I think that especially in the social sciences this issue is dwarfed by the fact that the studies are close to useless no matter how they are described: small studies, non-representative samples, small effects that are imprecisely measured, and so on. I just don’t trust these sorts of studies to answer the questions they claim to answer, or at least not in a generalizable way (by which I mean, generalizable to other populations and other situations), so I don’t see the point of performing them. Yeah, sure, the language is a problem, but it’s a tiny problem compared to the fact that the content is often useless.
Phil:
This came up in the previous thread, and here’s how I responded:
You write, “while few people (including scientists) outside the field would understand 3 days to mean long term, it would be understood as such by those most likely to be reading the work.”
This may be true of people who read the whole article from start to finish–or maybe not, I’m actually doubtful of this.
But I don’t think it’s the case of most people who read the title or abstract of the article. And the “long-term” phrase is in the title. The author of that paper has been featured uncritically many times on NPR, and I doubt that the NPR reporters, let alone the general audience, would think that “long-term” refers to 3 days.
The author also published a paper in JAMA entitled, “Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults.” In this context, it seems absolutely ridiculous to label 3 days as long-term effects, no matter what is the term of art in the subfield.
In any case, all ambiguity can be resolved by merely replacing “long-term” with “3 days” in the titles and abstracts of these papers. The use of “long-term” allows the authors to have it both ways: It’s a term of art within the subfield but it implies actual long term to outsiders.
I agree with you that this is minor compared to the triviality of the study itself. But that’s kind of the point: If they really had done a study of “Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults,” that could be important. So I don’t think the description of a 3-day study as long-term is just a term of art. It’s a means by which the authors can take something trivial and imply it’s important. Just as in that other study, the phrase “become more powerful” is false (or, to be precise, not addressed in any way by their experiment) but it allows the study to be presented as more important than it is. And just as how the case for arresting that guy would’ve been stronger had he actually been assaulting a police officer, but he wasn’t.
Andrew and Phil:
I agree with both of you. The JAMA article Andrew mentions sounds ridiculous.
Andrew, you close your post by asking the rest of us (who that is is left as an exercise) to stop tolarating such usage. But how? I was struck by the long-term/short-term usage because in molecular biology one sometime sees “short-term” and “long-term” used for, say, interference with or response of a cellular pathway, sometimes even with similar time scales (1 hour versus three days). Someone who knows just a little about molecular biology might think that makes sense for pathways. But it really doesn’t! It only makes sense when both terms are used relative to each other and the time scales are defined at the point of first use.
So, so Andrew’s closing plea, at least one obvious point of intervention is — when reviewing or editing manuscripts — to make demands of titles and abstracts that we wouldn’t necessarily make of the main text. For news media, even getting to parity would be progress.
Thanks for writing this; it’s an important topic. Have you considered publishing some version of this where it can reach a wider audience?
Kevin:
I’d love to reach a wider audience with this piece, but I don’t know how to do so. The funny thing is, I’m pretty well connected! I send emails to people at the New York Times and the Washington Post but they didn’t even reply. Unfortunately, that’s how it works in the world of journalism: If they’re doing a story, they’ll bug you; otherwise they’re too busy.
All of these people show a callous disregard for their professional obligations. They are willfully indifferent to their duties and to the husbandry of their profession’s collective authority. All of your examples involve people who ought to care about their job’s functions, but are unconcerned by them. Maybe they’re actively deceptive, but more often they just seem unbothered by the idea that they actually have to do their job.
I’m borrowing the idea of callous disregard from JLA Garcia’s theory of racism. The term captures active malice – “I hate Albanians” – but also gets cold indifference – “Sure bad things happen to Albanians, but what does that mean to me?” When I look at that medical professor’s testimony, I see someone shrugging and saying, “What business of mine is it if smoking really causes cancer?” But of course it is his business. He’s a damn doctor!
“Do your job” is underrated as a moral maxim. When you agree to be a doctor, professor, policeman, etc. you’re agreeing to do something valuable for other people. You don’t necessarily have to love it, but you do have to perform your functions. The rest of us can judge you based on how well you provide those services and chasten you for breaking the rules. As long as your personal ambitions are channeled into fulfilling your role, you’re doing the job.
These people do not want to do the job. They want to do something cosmetically similar to the job without having to bother themselves with the function they are supposed to fulfill. And, they’re happy to spend down the prestige of their social role. Every doctor should provide good medical care AND they should try to behave in a way that preserves the authority of doctors in general, when acting in their professional capacity. If someone uses their station to make ludicrous claims, then it is personally advantageous but undermines the social role itself. In the long run, it is self-undermining. E.g., if someone goes around saying that, as a doctor, they know that buying crystals makes your dick bigger, then people will distrust advice given by doctors.
A few possibilities come to mind as to why they seem so satisfied at their own incompetence.
They might be placating themselves with permissive cynicism. No one REALLY does their job; that’s all just hooplah to disguise personal interest and social power. A fool does his job, while a savvy man feeds off corruption. But that’s confusing an obvious failure mode with the purpose of the thing. Sure people can be scoundrels, but you’re supposed to police scoundrelry so that it doesn’t grow into a collective agreement to cheat.
Or, they might think of their job in terms of personal expression. Rather than imagining a social function that they must perform and live up to, they think of their position as an opportunity to express their personal will and narrative. This attitude lets you toss aside external standards and constraints and substitute your own satisfaction. It doesn’t matter if you’re “living your truth” as an administrator. It matters if things are well run for other people in the organization.
Finally, they might conflate the mechanics of career advancement with the actual substance of the work. If publishing splashy claims is how I get along as a professor, then being a professor is about publishing splashy results. But a professor should only publish true claims. Yes, exciting claims are advantageous and rewarded, but the point is to provide more knowledge about the world.
It occurs to me that this ties in with Bret Weinstein’s claim that we are in the midst of a “Cartesian Crisis.” As he describes it,
“The Cartesian Crisis describes the inability to be sure of anything—scientific claims, the basic facts of historical events, the degree to which a consensus is actually accepted by others.”
“Reckless disregard for the truth” is a good description, though somewhat long. In thinking about this issue recently, the term that came to mind was “counterfeit”. Even though this at first seems like an odd usage, the etymology seems to work OK (“counter” as contra/against and “feit” related to “making” something). In the sense described here, the normalization of (at best) half-truths in academia and other aspects of public life is motivated by a desire to claim something not earned.
“Against making” in a fundamental form, because shortcuts are easier and it’s presumed that everyone does it. This idea also sounds like hustle culture as realized by influencers, reality TV, etc. It’s everywhere – this is an era of counterfeits, fakes.