A young economist who prefers to remain anonymous writes:
Francesca Gino, the Harvard behavioural professor accused of fraud has had her tenure revoked from Harvard and her employment terminated. I’m honestly a bit surprised that this has happened, given how we’ve seen similar researchers facing similar accusations receive not even a slap on the wrist! But given the overwhelming evidence against her, this has to be a positive development, right? Hopefully one that leads to more similar such punishments?
Side note, would you be interested in hearing about another paper that claims to measure one thing but probably doesn’t? There’s a an interesting paper trying to quantify the impact of religion /religious belief on 17th-19th century development of science that seems to me to be using many proxy variables that are either not measuring what the author claims or have potentially such biased measurement errors that I don’t trust them much.
Regarding the first item, I replied that it says it was the “first time Harvard has removed a tenured instructor in about 80 years.” But they got rid of psychology professor Marc Hauser in 2012 for misreporting his monkey data. Maybe that’s different because they didn’t fire him, they just forced him to quit? My correspondent replied:
Yes, my limited understanding is that Hauser quit before anything else was done. Possibly forced to resign? I don’t know the details. Whereas Gino did not resign, she lost her tenure and so could be fired. An article by the Harvard Crimson suggests this may be unprecedented, all previous professors in similar situations having resigned.
I guess that Gino was different because most of the people involved in these scandals seem to want the scandal to go away quietly, and resigning is part of that. If the university wants to get rid of you, then your resignation is a bargaining chip that you can use to get better treatment, and the endgame is that you leave with a minimum of fuss. Gino is different because with her lawsuit she expressed a comfort with not going away quietly. If she wasn’t going to leave on her own, or if her conditions for retirement were to ask for $50 million or whatever, then it makes sense that Harvard just get rid of her. I say all this speculatively, not knowing any of the people involved. (I did have a brief exchange with Gino once, but all of it concerned statistics and research methods; Harvard and the lawsuit did not come up.)
Regarding the second item, my correspondent elaborates:
The paper is pretty ambitious and I appreciate what it’s trying to do. Trying to systematically quantify scientific accomplishments and the religiosity of scientists is an incredibly difficult task. But I’m really not sure that the paper succeeded.
Just as one (important) example, in section 2.3 the paper uses different measures of “impact of scientist” for individual level regressions. What are these measures? They’re taken from a different paper (Laouenan et al., 2022) and are all basically Wikidata/Wikipedia measures: Word count of all biographies, Biography readers and Number of Wikipedia editions.
There’s so many issues with doing this, I would not treat any of these measures as good examples of the “impact” (already a somewhat nebulous term) a scientist had. What exactly are we capturing by looking at the amount of focus devoted by 21st century Wikipedia writers and readers towards any individual scientist by these 3 measures? I’m really not sure, but I’m dubious that it really correlates well with the idea of the importance of a scientist had for the development of science. Furthermore, these measures will likely have measurement errors…
And I’d presume these measurement errors are likely correlated with the scientists religiosity (which also have measurement errors of their own); the paper says as much “First, could the excessive fame of these freethinkers be related not to their intellectual contributions but instead to the controversies surrounding their religious views?” which is only of many channels through which there could be endogeneity here.
Just as another example, since most Wikipedia writers are from rich countries, with much more atheistic populations compared to the rest of the world, it’s not a stretch to assume they are more likely to devote attention towards atheistic scientists from previous centuries. Ditto for readers.
They try to mitigate things as best they can, but overall I’m rather sceptical of the results. Like I said, an ambitious paper, but one that, at least to me, seems to not do what it claims it does.
The paper, Science and Religious Dogmatism, is by Matías Cabello, and its abstract concludes:
Throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period, scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.
I agree with my anonymous correspondent that such things are hard to measure, not just scientific productivity or importance or influence but also religious beliefs. I’ve often wondered what my religious beliefs would’ve been, had I grown up among my ancestors 200 or 300 or 400 years ago. (I have a pretty good idea what my beliefs would’ve been had I been born into my family 100 years ago, because that was around when my parents were growing up.)
P.S. It’s interesting that the author of the paper is studying economics, as this sort of thing seems like straight-up sociology. I guess there are just lots more economists than sociologists out there doing historical and quantitative studies.
Most scientists have been religious throughout history. One of the most famous examples is Newton, who wrote more about esoteric interpretations of Christianity than he did about physics.
Also, the so-called “conflict thesis”, that religion and science are in conflict, dates to the 1800s, and is considered discredited by historians today. Before that, nobody thought religion and science conflicted in any way. Religion was about morality, science was about discovering the truth about God’s creation, or something equivalent. If science seemed to contradict the scripture, scripture had to be read metaphorically and not literally. Etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis
Anon:
A claim about “most scientists . . . throughout history” goes far beyond any data you could possible have. This is your speculation, it might be true (depending on how you define “religious”), maybe not.
Regarding the “conflict thesis,” I think that some confusion arises in that “being religious” is often thought to refer to belief in certain supernatural doctrines, but it also corresponds to a group allegiance. Maybe a good analogy in today’s world is patriotism. I can be a patriotic American without having to believe in any particular statement about the country. Patriotism is more of an alignment or state of mind than a collection of beliefs.
When it comes to “patriotism,” the most famous quotation is from Samuel Johnson, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Some digging, indicates that Johnson’s assertion is not what is usually believed:
https://interestingliterature.com/2021/05/patriotism-is-the-last-refuge-of-the-scoundrel-meaning-origins/
Actually, it takes a great deal of digging so have a look at what the above reference asserts to be the true meaning of Johnson’s claim. Much of it hinges on the definite article, “the” vs. the indefinite article, “a”.
Another famous remark regarding patriotism:
“My country, right or wrong” is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober”
G.K. Chesterton, 1901
It is true that it is a speculation, but it’s pretty reasonable, I think. Most people throughout history have been religious, and scientists are basically just like other people, science being a formalized version of everyday rationality, as Sokal puts it.
I think the entire paper under discussion is motivated by the conflict thesis, which is why I brought it up. It is very common for people who believe in this thesis to believe that science conflicts with organized religion as well as with religious belief itself. Newton is, again, a good example. He was intensely religious, but his interpretation disagreed with the prevailing interpretation of the Church of his day, and he would have been considered a heretic had he publicly stated his views. Organized religion would have chewed him up and spat him out.
I think historians would be better equipped to answer the question of the paper than economists. I have not read the many books referenced on Wikipedia, but anyone wanting to get actual data on the subject should probably start there.
I did some searching as a result also of your first comment. I have previously heard about monks copying text and things like that, which I came across again just now. I thought the following I came across might be interesting to share:
“The Catholic Church’s relationship with science is a complex and multifaceted one. While the Church has sometimes been portrayed as an enemy of science, a more nuanced examination reveals that it has played a significant role in preserving, promoting, and advancing scientific knowledge. Through the preservation of classical texts, the establishment of universities, and the patronage of scientific research, the Church has made valuable contributions to the development of science. The contributions of individual members, particularly those within religious orders such as the Jesuits, have further enriched the scientific landscape. While challenges and controversies have undoubtedly existed, they should not overshadow the significant contributions the Church has made to the study of science, particularly in periods where secular alternatives were limited or nonexistent. Understanding this complex history requires moving beyond simplistic narratives and engaging with the historical record in a more critical and informed manner. The Church’s role in the history of science is a rich and complex tapestry, woven with threads of support, opposition, and nuanced engagement, offering valuable insights into the broader relationship between science, religion, and society.”
God/gods were replaced by unfathomably large “random” sequences.
When the god premise worked, it differed in that the laws of nature were supposed to be discoverable and make sense. When it failed, it was due to allowing arbitrary miracles (“god works in mysterious ways”).
The modern randomness principle has the problem of not needing to make sense, and extreme size/timeframes allow almost anything to happen if we really want to allow for an apparent anomaly.
I suggest using a principle of “the universe is ultimately simple and makes sense” without the unnecessary god aspect. Of course the derived consequences can be arbitrarily complex, but basic premises/laws should be simple. Something like cellular automata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
The idea is that the belief “it should make sense” keeps people from settling for bizarre, byzantine explanations overfit to existing observations. They push forward for more satisfying explanations that will generalize better.
Religiousity is hard to measure. Who was more religious, Galileo or the interrogators who forced him to recant heliocentricism?
I read some stuff about Copernicus, which if I understand correctly proposed heliocentricism. I read at several places that some think that Copernicus was a priest, and there seems to be agreement that whether he was or wasn’t a priest he worked in or for the church as a “canon”. Please check and verify, this is all new stuff and these are all new terms for me.
Anyway, to add some more information regarding the topic of the blog post and your comment, here are some quotes I gathered after some more online searching:
“What he did do for most of his professional career, is serve as a canon of the church in Frombork, in the region of Polish Warmia where he lived. This entailed among other dutues the financial management of a great church and diocese. In addition to these administrative duties, Copernicus also served as medical practitioner for his fellow canons and his bishop. ”
“Although we will likely never know with certainty about Copernicus’ status, he was certainly a faithful man of the Church. During the Fifth Lateran Council, he was consulted on calendar reform. Meanwhile, Copernicus’ correspondence was primarily in Latin, and the only known example of his writing in Polish was an inscription from his personal library: Bok pomagay (“God help me;” in modern Polish, this would be rendered as Bóg pomagaj or Boże pomagaj), evidence of his ardent faith.”
And in light of your comment “Religiousity is hard to measure.” I thought I’d share the following as well:
“But as a canon, he was, like a priest, required to take an oath of celibacy. It was an oath Copernicus broke repeatedly, as Jack Repcheck illustrates in his more recent popular biography.”
Your comments amplify my point that religiousness is not measurable. An atheist living a life of sexual continence is probably considered less religious than a believer who is a bit of a player.
Most academics probably conform to the prevailing religious beliefs of their times in order to safeguard their careers even if deep in their hearts they harbor doubts.
Quote from above: “(…) than a believer who is a bit of a player.”
Copernicus just before braking the oath of celibacy : “Tu es centrum universi mei”
Galileo was a Trump-like character who personally knew the pope, then wrote a book putting the pope’s arguments in the mouth of a character named “simpleton”. Only after that did the bureaucracy spring into action.
For most here, imagine how you feel about “vaccine misinformation”, same thing at the time.
Also, we now know you can choose whatever reference frame you want. Earth and sun are equally valid. For navigating the earth we still use geocentric, navigating the solar system heliocentric. Using galactocentric you get an entirely different picture (similar to Descartes’ vortices).
On your PS: I think there’s also a difference in the cultures of sociology and economics. In sociology, research specialties are important: if you were going to write a paper like this, you would need to get familiar with a lot of work in the sociology of science and comparative-historical sociology and situate your research in relation to that literature. In economics, there’s a sense that if you have good general skills and new data, you can drop in and make a contribution. This paper mentions the sociology of science literature, but doesn’t seem to discuss it in anywhere near the depth that would be expected in sociology.
I’m not criticizing economists here–I’d say that the best attitude is somewhere in between the prevailing sociology and economics positions, but probably closer to economics.
This is totally correct. A topic like this in sociology would require years of reading and data collection. But not as much (or the same process) as for a historian.
Yes in sociology we generally assume that if you are going to make big macrohistorical claims you will really read the literature but also collect serious contemporaneous data (not data from English Wikipedia) and that a universal claim, such as that in the title of the article, not be tested only with data from Europe. Not to mention that “rise of capitalism” and “resources spent on conquering the new world” might be just as good an explanation for what might have been happening.
What is the connection to sociology?
Andrew tends to use that tag for items that have to do with anything social, not because there is any sociology (or sociologists) involved.
FYI, the Gino case is still in active litigation.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67659904/gino-v-president-and-fellows-of-harvard-college/
I just looked again, and document 126 makes for some miniseries-drama level reading, e.g.
“True to form, however, there was more to Harvard’s plan. Within hours of delivering this news to Plaintiff, Dean Datar’s office contacted one of Plaintiff’s colleagues and asked her to “counsel out” Plaintiff, meaning to persuade Plaintiff to resign. This female colleague was told that, if Plaintiff agreed to leave Harvard, “this will all go away; we won’t say anything to anyone.”
But that too was a lie. …”
I just can’t figure it out. I know there’s some high-stakes academic politics being played out here, but it’s beyond my comprehension.
I checked doc 126 out and it seems to me that “this will all go away” likely means or implies that nothing about the possible questionable and/or fraudulent activities would be communicated to the public or something like that.
After the “But that too was a lie” in doc 126 under point 11 and 12 more can be read. For example:
“Harvard knew that Data Colada still planned to publicly disclose its salacious allegations against Plaintiff and that, when it did so, Data Colada would be disclosing information concerning Harvard’s purported investigation—which Harvard had agreed to provide in accordance with their deal.”
“Far from making the allegations “go away,” Plaintiff’s resignation would have been publicly interpreted as an admission of guilt.”
Anyway, I found some recent info that seemed to me to indicate that Harvard is now sueing Gino, and is asking the judge to look into it or something like that. Perhaps that’s why the case is still in “active litigation” but I am not familiar with these terms and how this all works.
Yeah, what Andrew said about nonsensical claims.
The Data Colada guys finally got to see the results of the Harvard investigation after the judge ordered it released. Harvard’s policy was to withhold the investigation report.
Gino is being helped by Harvard lawyer Lawrence Lessig, and the result is a veritable fountain of nonsense. There is nothing that links the data anomalies together in a way that it could be argued that a single bad actor, other than Gino herself, is to blame. It would have to be multiple people in different settings doing different things to fix the data.
When a defense lawyer find themselves in this situation, what you get is racehorsing. This is the legal term named after Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, who argued in alternatives. From wikipedia:
“Say you sue me because you claim my dog bit you. Well now, this is my defense: My dog doesn’t bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don’t believe you really got bit. And fourth, I don’t have a dog.”
Lessig has already generated dozens of different ways in which Gino doesn’t even have a dog.
“Gino is being helped by Harvard lawyer Lawrence Lessig, and the result is a veritable fountain of nonsense’
I think I recognise that name from a podcast I just came across as well and listened to a bit. If I remember and understand correctly Gino was interviewed there by a lawyer who seemed to have a podcast and was now doing a series (with a few more to come) about the Gino case. I guess that must be Lessig. It was over an hour long, and I skipped through it and remembered why I don’t tend to enjoy listening to people like Gino, lawyers, and podcasts in general.
Here’s the start of Lessig’s postings on the case: https://lessig.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-francesca-gino
I’ve been acquainted with Lessig from a long time back regarding Internet policy, though not recently. I don’t agree with him on everything. However, I’d strongly defend him as being a very sincere person. His part here is not unclear to me. I think he believes in her as a friend and colleague. That is, he thinks she is indeed innocent.
Seth:
I followed the link, where Lessig announces that Gino is innocent (not even that he thinks Gino is innocent, just that she is), and he says he’ll reveal all in a podcast of approximately 6 to 8 episodes.
I enjoyed this sequence of comments to Lessig’s post. First there’s your comment:
And then the reply by another commenter, Nicolas Roman:
Since then, the first three episodes of the podcast have appeared on Lessig’s blog. With transcripts. I read them, and here’s my quick summary:
Episode 1: Introduction, lots of throat-clearing and discussion of procedure. Nothing yet about the research fraud.
Episode 2: More on procedure, lots on Gino’s life story, some background about how, back in the day, everybody in her field was sloppy with data. Gino brings up research error: “when the news broke in the summer of 2023, co-authors reacted by saying, ‘we should have a database of all the papers that we wrote with Francesca and try to see if there are issues, as far as we know, in the other papers.’ . . . one co-author . . . decided to audit all the papers she co-authored with me, and she had seven. And as it turns out, in her audits, she ended up finding errors in studies where I didn’t have anything to do with the data collection, data cleaning or data analysis.”
OK, so those error’s weren’t Gino’s fault–she had nothing to do with the data in any way! I hope at least that the other authors of those seven papers felt bad about making these errors. I guess Gino has had some really bad luck with collaborators. Like Dan Ariely, she keeps ending up with her name on papers with erroneous or fraudulent data.
But I didn’t notice this interview discussing the research fraud that “broke in the summer of 2023,” the work that motivated people to look into Gino’s other papers. That would be the biggie, right.
Also there’s lots of talk in this podcast about the work of Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (the “Data Colada” collaborators), but I don’t yet see any discussion of the particular problems they found in those published papers.
Lessig also does this weird thing where he tries to minimize the problem: “500 studies that get revealed in 140 papers. And you were charged here with four papers where these anomalies existed, so less than 1% of these papers. I’m a lawyer, so I am doing the math.”
Ummm, Larry, you’re not so good at math! 4/140 is a lot more than 4%. And it’s more than 4 papers. Right above in the interview, Gino mentioned 7 of her papers, and that’s just considering one of her coauthors.
In any case, I imagine that Lessig is an awesome defense attorney. I can see him right now in the closing argument: “Yes, my client happened to be in the bank holding a gun during the time of the robbery, and, yes, the security camera caught him running out the back door with a bag of money, but he went to that bank 140 times, and he was only caught robbing it 4 times. Hardly a true bank robber, eh? And who among us hasn’t been occasionally sloppy with receipts?”
I guess the meat of the argument comes in the middle of this episode, where, when Lessig asks how many people “touched the data” from those 140 papers, Gino replies, “It’s probably in the hundreds. I had at some point during the investigation to look back to all the research associates that worked with me, and I had 66 research assistants who were working for me paid. But then there were many more, actually, that were doing work related to my research or the research I was doing with my graduate students that were doing it for class credit. And so we’re talking about hundreds of people.”
So it looks like they’re going for argument (a) in Nicolas Roman’s list above.
I guess the real lesson here is, don’t publish papers where you have not been involved in the data collection, data cleaning or data analysis, and where this work was done by some student you can’t even remember who was doing it for class credit. Somebody has to take responsibility, no? If there are collaborators in the project who you’re absolutely relying on–someone who’s in the position to manipulate data or even fake an experiment–then, at the very least, you should include them as coauthors.
To include crucial collaborators as coauthors, that’s standard practice in academic research. I wonder if Lessig didn’t realize this because he’s a lawyer, and authorship of law reports is done in a different way. I’ve signed my name to expert reports that mostly were not written by me. I do make it a practice to read anything I put my name on, but in the legal realm I recognize that there will be many hands on the document, lots of people who are not listed as authors. I think that’s one reason why so many prominent law professors have plagiarized: they’re following the conventions of legal documents, not academic writing.
Back to the Episode 2 transcript . . . there’s lots of stuff about Harvard, and when they notified Gino, not much about the details of the research fraud.
But there is this, from Lessig: “Yeah, if you had manufactured the data, you would have had a pretty good answer, because you would have come in there thinking, ‘Oh, those are the 24 rows there must be they must have discovered the 24 rows I added. So what’s my answer? Oh, here’s the answer.’ But you’re kind of cold called, here are 24 rows that seem to have these weird characteristics to them. Like, what is this? And you don’t have a good answer.”
Wait–this guy’s a law professor? And he’s trying the, “The fact that my client has no alibi is actually evidence of innocence, because a guilty person would’ve come up with a slick explanation” argument?? This is real life, dude, not Columbo.
Then there’s a bunch of stuff about forensics.
One thing that strikes me about all this discussion is that so little interest is expressed in how it happened, that all these papers with garbled, manipulated, or fake data got published in leading journals, that the news media fell for it hook, line, and sinker, for years and years. As a person who cares about judgment and decision theory, a person who thinks psychology research is important for the world, this really distresses me. But Lessig expresses no concern about this at all! Whenever the actual data problems get discussed, he’s quick to dismiss them.
I get it. Psychology and decision analysis aren’t Lessig’s area of research, so he doesn’t really care. But I think it’s always a mistake to talk about a dispute of this sort without addressing the legitimate reasons why people think it’s important.
Episode 3: We get lots more about Harvard’s investigation procedure, which happened at about the same time that some plagiarism was discovered in past writings of Harvard’s president.
But what about the evidence? Lessig continues with the teasers: “I might be biased. Of course, I am biased. I have a view here. I’m advancing my belief on the basis of that view, but I’m going to predict that no fair listener, after they hear the evidence which will come in the later episodes, will be able to conclude that the evidence comes anywhere close to these standards.”
I guess that’s how lawyers talk. Instead of giving you the evidence, they just keep saying they’re gonna give it to you, sometime in the future. On the plus side, these podcast episodes are free, so it’s not like he’s just shilling (“Tune in next week to hear the exciting conclusion of our story!).
To continue: We learn that Gino submitted a 93-page, single-spaced response, which Lessig characterizes as “an extremely powerful document.” But no details yet about the data problems. He does say, “we’re going to cover more in detail the specifics of the Maidstone errors in the subsequent episodes”–but I don’t care about the Maidstone errors! I care about the errors in the scientific literature, the junk science that was promoted on NPR, Ted, etc. etc. for over a decade. The errors that were presumably committed by various of Gino’s hundreds of collaborators.
Then I find out something new: sociologist Jeremy Freese wrote a 230-page report on this case for Harvard. I know Jeremy Freese! He (and also, for that matter, Claudine Gay) served on the board of the General Social Survey with me, a couple decades ago. 230 pages is a lot.
Then there’s this part, which I don’t fully understand. Lessig asks, “how much money had you spent at that point to write the defense to the Maidstone report in the original complaint over the course of that year?”, and Gino replies that she spent $2,000,000. I’m not sure what that means. If she wrote this 93-page document . . . she couldn’t have paid herself 2 million dollars. Maybe she paid $2 million in legal fees, but then that’s for legal advice and filings or whatever?
Anyway, I truly believe this has all been traumatic for Gino, personally, professionally, and financially. Of course, if it’s true that she manipulated or faked data (perhaps in the belief that “everybody does it”), then it would still be traumatic in all these senses for her to be caught out. I guess what I’m saying here is that (a) the trauma is not evidence of innocence, and (b) I can well believe that this has been a horrible experience for her, innocent or guilty, and it seems that Lessig is reacting with sympathy.
Gino continues, “I had to respond to the report that Freese wrote, but that also required going back to the data, trying to understand his analysis, and point out the places where he was wrong.”
Maybe! But shouldn’t she also look for the places where she was wrong? After all, there have been errors found in multiple papers (7 with a single coauthor alone) where Gino “didn’t have anything to do with the data collection, data cleaning or data analysis.” It also seems that hundreds of people have touched the data in her papers. She even did some collaboration with the notorious Dan Ariely, for chrissake! Not to mention that some of these papers came to scientifically implausible conclusions. Put that all together, and at the very least she’s coauthored papers with serious data problems. So I don’t think she should be so sure that a respected outsider is wrong. She should at least consider the possibility that the problem is closer to home.
And Lessig, as the interviewer, should consider that possibility too.
Gino continues: “I found it really hard to read what [Freese] wrote, because he had such great confidence in these falsification scenarios, and yet they came from a person who knew nothing about my research practices and how I worked.”
But, she already talked about her hundreds of collaborators and the fact that she’d coauthored multiple papers with data problems where she “didn’t have anything to do with the data collection, data cleaning or data analysis.”
Based on that testimony, it sounds like she doesn’t know so much about her own research practices!
I’m serious here. This is not meant as a “gotcha.” It just seems nuts for someone to put her name on 120 papers, disclaim responsibility for research errors when they arise, and then criticize an outsider for trying to reconstruct what happened.
It’s the authors’ job when writing a paper to document what they did. If the results of the paper can’t be reconstructed, then damn right an outsider can speculate. What’s Freese supposed to do, just say the numbers appeared by magic?
The podcast episode continues with lots more about Harvard’s process–I’m glad there’s a transcript here, I don’t think I’d have the patience to listen to it all, even at 2x–apparently Harvard hired a “Really great Boston firm, really, really good lawyers.”
And then we get back to the published articles. Lessig: “Okay, so we’re now talking about four papers over these 25 years, and the allegations in this case are about four papers, three of which are at least 10 years old. Now anyone with any sense of fair process, would ask a pretty obvious question here. Isn’t there the equivalent of a statute of limitations about such charge?”
OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe there really is fraud, but it was done so many years ago that Gino should still remain a tenured professor at Harvard. I wouldn’t want to send my kid to a university to take classes–or, worse, be a research assistant for–someone who committed multiple instances of research fraud (or maybe just had the very bad luck to be involved with many high-profile papers with very serious data problems that are consistent with fraudulent manipulation), even if some of these cases happened over ten years ago. But, you know that saying, “Behind every great fortune is a crime”? Maybe there is something to this “statute of limitations” thing, I don’t know.
I’m fortunate to not be in charge of Harvard, or Columbia, or any such committee. I’m just a researcher who is interested in psychology, and judgment and decision making, and I can say I’m very concerned about the evidential status of some of the most high-profile work in this area, with problems up to an including outright fraud. But maybe Lessig’s right that Gino should still be teaching at Harvard.
Lessig concludes, “In the next episodes we’re going to work through whether anybody could fairly believe that the evidence shows that you committed academic fraud. And so from my perspective, it’s both because I think there’s no sufficient evidence that you committed academic fraud, and that I think that this process was an embarrassment to a great university, that I thought it is important that we find a way to tell this story. . . . In the next episodes, we will turn to the actual papers and the claims of academic misconduct made against each of them.”
We’ll see, but at this point it seems that Lessig is edging toward the door. He started by saying flat-out that Gino was “innocent,” but now he’s moving to “there’s no sufficient evidence that you committed academic fraud, and that I think that this process was an embarrassment to a great university.”
You know, I think Harvard’s a great university too. I got my Ph.D. there! But what I think is an embarrassment is that they had a business school professor who published papers with such serious problems. It was also embarrassing that they had a professor in the psychology department a few years earlier who’d fabricated data, and I guess it was also embarrassing to Harvard that they had to kick him out, but less embarrassing (from my perspective) than if they’d kept him on. Also embarrassing is that Harvard had a president who plagiarized, as also did Laurence Tribe, one of Harvard Law School’s most famous professors, also embarrassing that another famous Harvard Law School professor was describing the work of now-disgraced behavioral researcher Brian Wansink as “masterpieces,” also embarrassing that another famous Harvard Law School professor is a 2020 election denier . . . lots of embarrassment to go around!
Don’t get me wrong, Columbia has a lot to be embarrassed about too, starting with the fact that they pay big bucks to a political science professor who wastes his work time writing blog comments.
My only point is: from an outside perspective, the embarrassment is all that bad research published by a Harvard professor that got so much hype. The fact that Harvard was actually trying to do something about it, rather than just whitewashing, I think that’s a good thing.
But we’ll see what Lessig has to offer in future episodes.
Whoever kept funding study after study without any independent replication is responsible, followed by anybody who trusts a claim without completion of that step.
If we lower our standards to where they are now, this is what we get. Fraud vs mistake doesn’t really make any difference. If its fraud, it looks very unsophisticated and easy to detect. Its probably the tip of the iceberg.
Andrew wrote:
“‘Lessig also does this weird thing where he tries to minimize the problem: “500 studies that get revealed in 140 papers. And you were charged here with four papers where these anomalies existed, so less than 1% of these papers. I’m a lawyer, so I am doing the math.'”
Ummm, Larry, you’re not so good at math! 4/140 is a lot more than 4%. And it’s more than 4 papers. Right above in the interview, Gino mentioned 7 of her papers, and that’s just considering one of her coauthors.”
There is a minor typo in here, Andrew meant to write that 4/140 is a lot more than 1%.
But that is not the point of this comment. It occurred to me that if we really want to assess how much fraud Gino committed without the level of scrutiny Datacolada applied, there is a way to at least estimate it.
The “140 papers” refers to the Manycoauthors.org website, which has a numbered list of papers ending in 140. The page listing the papers opens when you press a button labeled “138 papers.” But that is not right either, some of the numbers are out of sequence and there are only 123 actual papers. Now, out of those 123, Gino was only involved in data collection on 61. So when we wade through all this sloppiness, we find that the real denominator in any calculation would be 61, not 140.
But that is still not the point. First I must make a minor digression. The Datacolada guys were not the ones who first became suspicious of Gino, that was a graduate student named Zoey Ziani. Ms. Ziani wrote an essay on her experiences. She wrote that she was casting around for a topic for her dissertation when her advisor suggested she read papers by Gino and do something similar. Ziani was shocked that Gino could perform these profoundly goofy interventions that always yielded amazingly strong effects. She told her advisor she wanted to audit those papers, but her advisor told her that was a terrible idea and she was forbidden to do so. Ziani left the field soon after and messaged Datacolada with her concerns.
It occurred to me that we could look through Gino’s papers for that very thing Ziani noticed, crazy low p values in the studies in which Gino collected the data (or her RAs on her behalf). So I went through most of the papers at Manycoauthors looking for crazy low p values. There is of course lots of complexity I had to smooth out, especially when Gino is not first author. Below is a summary of what I found by looking at the actual papers, almost all of which are freely available on Google Scholar.
I started by looking at all of the first 15 papers on which her name appears. The first paper was in 2007 with Don Moore. After those first 15, I switched to looking at every fifth paper until about 2017, then finished by looking at all of her recent papers in which she collected data. I will describe the general patterns I saw.
The first paper produced numerous p values of p<.0001. Apparently she decided that that was a little TOO good, because the second paper had multiple instances of p<.001 for all main effects, but no more p<.0001. This latter number, p<.001, became Gino's signature result. Starting with No. 2, she wrote eleven consecutive papers in which the main effects consistently produced p<.001. There was one weird exception in 2010 in a paper with Norton and Ariely. The p values were reported as "p" with a subscript of "rep" and values of .97 to .99. Not sure what that means, but it seems to mark a shift that occurred because she was now working closely with others. I should note that this period from 2008 to 2012 was when Gino became a superstar because of those low p values.
After that things get more complicated. Her career shifted towards lab management and away from data collection, and most of the papers had a different first author. There were still plenty of studies by Gino, though, pretty much all resulting in p<.001 for main effects. In numerous papers, experiments by her coauthors produced more typical p values like .03, and Gino seems to have responded by ginning up some softer numbers herself so that her signature p<.001 did not stand out so much. Nevertheless, that crazy low p value continues to show up all the way to the most recent paper in which Gino collected raw data that is not now available.
One interesting outlier is the paper she coauthored with Uri Simonsohn in 2013 entitled "Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment From 10 Years Of M.B.A. Admissions Interviews." There are no anomalously low p values in this paper.
Getting back to the original claim of <1% fraud, I would like to offer some different numbers. Excluding the papers that don't fit the pattern (the Simonsohn paper, ones that are paywalled, ones lacking multiple p<.001, ones where she did post the raw data) I estimate that Gino produced approximately 40 fraudulent papers or at least 2/3rds of those in which she collected data. The pattern suggests that the only reason it wasn't all of her papers is that she was worried about her coauthors getting suspicious.
Seth:
I don’t know either, but my general impression is that the legal world is like the Ted-talk world: there are strong positive incentives to make outrageous statements and very little penalty for publicly making a nonsensical claim.
A possible example of this I just came across when reading a bit more in doc 126. Under point 223 and 224 there seems to be a big deal being made about “the original dataset” and “data voluntarily posted by Professor Gino”.
The following quotes for doc 126 might provide a possible example of making outrageous statements and/or making a nonsensical claim:
“(…) the RIO referenced so-called “data anomalies” for Study 1 relative to discrepancies between data voluntarily posted by Professor Gino on the Open Sciences Framework (“OSF”) in 2020 and a dataset that the RIO described as an “original dataset provided by a research assistant.”
“This statement was demonstrably and verifiably false. The data provided to HBS by Professor Gino’s former research assistant was in an Excel spreadsheet and was not the “original dataset” for Study 1. The “original dataset” for Study 1 had been collected on paper in 2010, a fact that was clearly documented in the original 2012 PNAS Paper”
In my interpretation (but perhaps I am misunderstanding) the “original dataset” is a term used to make a distinction between the one “voluntarily posted” (and possibly different) and the Excel spreadsheet “original dataset” (presumably the one used to subsequently make the voluntarily posted one).
It seems pretty normal to me to use such terms to describe the situation, and to make the distintion between two datasets in light of what is crucial here. That the “original dataset” is based on data collected on paper seems largely irrelevant here. Additionally, it seems strange to name data collected on paper a “dataset”: you might call it “data”, but not a “dataset”. The sentence “the original dataset for Study 1 had been collected on paper in 2010” further indicates a mixing of the words “data” and “data set” in my view: one doesn’t collect a dataset, one collects data.
If this reasoning makes sense, this might be a nice example of 1) an outrageuous statement (“this statement was demonstrably and verifiably false”), and 2) a nonsensical claim (” The “original dataset” for Study 1 had been collected on paper in 2010″).
Andrew: Apologies, I didn’t mean to send you down a long rabbit-hole yourself! Let me expand on some of what I’ve been talking about. In general, I have a great deal of sympathy for someone who says they’re suffering a miscarriage of justice by the authorities. I’m often inclined to at least skim their defense, or sometimes look over public evidence in a “True Crime” case wondering if there’s key factual points which can be established.
I’m a professional programmer, and pretty good at figuring out if certain related technical claims are true or not (in case this comment might come back to haunt me one day, I have to disclaim here I’m not making an expert-witness level assertion on the Gino case, merely discussing certain thoughts I have at the moment, for “fun”). Anyway, I looked directly at the raw data for the class-year-is-Harvard example, and it’s quite bad. I tried to figure out if there was any way it could happen in a reasonable manner, and couldn’t come up with anything.
For example, if someone knowingly faked results, so poorly that it would have obvious problems if anyone ever just looked at the raw data, shouldn’t they contrive as soon as possible to lose that file in a fire, err, disk crash? Yes, I know, smart politicians have messed up by doing things like paying for a prostitute via check, and gotten caught that way. But this just seems to be a wild string of ineptitude. First, faking the data so badly it’ll raise a red flag on inspection. Then, not “losing” the faked data. Further, actually posting the faked data, i.e. without making some sort of “revised” data set. Yes, this isn’t _Columbo_, but we’re talking here a level more like _America’s Dumbest Criminals_ .
But saying someone else might have been the faker doesn’t make sense. Why did they fake it so badly then? And if the claim is it was done so badly from malicious motives, why did that person just leave it there, and not anonymously report it as fake? Plus such a person is asking for themselves to be found out, as it’ll probably be obvious who had the motive and access to do it. Thus that line doesn’t make sense either.
The other line of defense is that this poor data was just blindly transcribed somehow from a scammer running the survey repeatedly for the reward. OK, but that’s basically pleading complete research incompetence. It’s claiming the work wasn’t given even the slightest cursory look-over. Now, this isn’t an unknown type of plea. It’s akin to “I didn’t commit massive criminal accounting fraud, I’m just an utter failure of an accountant who is suffering from early-onset dementia and can no longer reliably add two numbers together”. People will definitely say stuff like that to try to get out of years of prison (or, I guess, not lose tenure at Harvard). But it’s a tough sell, because it basically means saying in court under oath that you’re a *personal* fraud, and expecting people to believe it. It may be the best legal line, but it sure looks like lying through one’s teeth and just hoping it can’t be disproved to legal standards.
Thus, *IF* Gino is a faker, she’s a horribly bad faker here – well, maybe, it’s not impossible. But it sure seems like the old sitcom set in a high school, where a running joke was that one of the students would hand in forged excuse notes to the teacher which were wildly implausible. Yet *IF* Gino is not a faker, there’s some ridiculous data which needs ‘plaining. At this point, I remind myself of the old expression: Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Seth:
I agree that it can be hard to make sense of all the details. In some sense this is a “statistical” problem in the sense that, if you gather enough evidence, eventually you’ll find some data that point in opposite directions, in the same way that if you watch enough basketball games, you’ll occasionally find examples of bad teams playing really well and winning games that, on average, they wouldn’t.
In this specific case . . . like you, I’m just speculating here, not claiming any special knowledge of the case, you write: “if someone knowingly faked results, so poorly that it would have obvious problems if anyone ever just looked at the raw data, shouldn’t they contrive as soon as possible to lose that file in a fire, err, disk crash?”
To that, my response is, Yeah, maybe. But what it this person had written lots of papers with data that were faked or manipulated or grabbed from other sources of just plain garbled?
I’m thinking here of Brian Wansink, the behavioral researcher who published lots and lots of papers with claims that weren’t supported by his data, claims that were inconsistent with the data being offered, and in many cases data that were not internally coherent. I have no idea what was going on–it seems very possible that some of the experiments he claimed never happened at all, other times maybe he changed the story of the data or reconstructed things from memory, or he combined data from different experiments, or maybe he added or removed data as necessary to get the results he wanted, . . . all sorts of things, with the common thread being that the data didn’t really matter and the experiments were just stories. And his notorious blog posts on research methods suggested that he didn’t even realize he was doing anything unethical or out of the ordinary–an attitude perhaps fortified by the fact that leaders in his field (e.g., the Nudge authors) praised his work unreservedly.
To return to Gino: she worked in a field where leading researchers used very sloppy and perhaps fraudulent practices. She was a collaborator with Dan Ariely! So it seems possible that she did lots of bad things with data collection, manipulation, and analysis–she kind of acknowledges this in episode 2 of Lessig’s podcast–in a lot of projects, without recognizing the damage that this can do to science. In this story, plausible to me, Gino was working hard and playing by the rules, as she saw it. So she’d have no reason to be destroying evidence. Then, later, when there was the investigation, she may well have thought that having any data at all was a good defense. Also, she might have felt it was dishonest to destroy any data at that point. If she felt that she’d behaved well on the whole, she could well have thought that, once Harvard had all the evidence, they’d put things into perspective and resolve the investigation in her favor.
I guess what I’m saying is, there’s no need to frame this as a situation where Gino is either (a) a complete fraud, or (b) completely innocent. It could be–and, again, I’m just speculating–it could be that she did various data manipulations that she should’ve known were unethical, even at the time, but that she, like Wansink, was just using data and claims of data as a means to an end, with the end being to write a series of papers expressing a view that she thought was correct. Don’t get me wrong here, I would consider such behavior to be unethical! But she doesn’t have to be a cackling villain to do it.
One might also say that it’s unfair of us to speculate from the outside. But I’ll defend our speculation on the grounds that this is all in public. Gino chose to put her name on those papers with the fraudulent or otherwise manipulated data, Gino chose to sue those other psychology researchers, Lessig chose to publicly claim her innocence and attack the reports by Harvard, Jeremy Freese, etc. I don’t think there’s any rule whereby Lessig is allowed to speculate on all of this and we’re not allowed to speculate too.
Since that paper is including things like philosophy in with science, I think the result has a mechanical aspect to it. Atheistic innovations in philosophy were developed in that period, while religious doctrine stayed similar, meaning the atheistic philosophers will be more influential by default. It doesn’t really answer the question about Science, although I personally doubt that medieval religion was a friend of scientific progress.
I’m also not convinced that enough thought has gone into other aspects of the modelling – I see no descriptive stats for the regressions, or sensitivity analysis, and I suspect that Poisson or Logged dependent variables would be much more appropriate for some outcomes than simple OLS.
As a side note:
I pondered mentioning the blogpost about bold finctional names as a sign of confidence (dated June 27, 2025) yesterday when I quoted something that included the name “Jack Repcheck”. I look that name up, and reasoned it might have been not a real name because it seems he is an author and editor, and names in the literary- and publishing-world might be made up.
But having come across the name “Lawrence Lessig” in further comments, I now thought about the blogpost about bold fictional names again. I think “Jack Repcheck” and “Lawrence Lessig” might fit nicely with the names mentioned in the June 27th blogpost:
“Speaking of names in fiction, we were watching Slow Horses recently (I read the book awhile ago), and I got to thinking about the excellent names he chose for the characters: Jackson Lamb, River Cartwright, Diana Taverner, Charles Partner, Jack Repcheck, Lawrence Lessig . . . each name is just a little bit more than it needs to be, in a way that gives the book a sense of heightened reality.”
Joshuanonymous,
Yes, there are excellent names in real life, which makes sense because parents get to choose them, and some parents choose cool names! I have a friend named Vance Maverick. That’s a great name by any standard, at least in the U.S.
“I have a friend named Vance Maverick. That’s a great name by any standard, at least in the U.S.”
Wow, that’s a Top (Gun) name indeed!
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for posting this, I appreciate both your thoughts (and agreement with my own) in he Cabello paper and the comments above on it too. Totally agree with Weakliem that many economists just jump in and don’t worry about whether they have a deep understanding of a field before writing something!
I also enjoyed reading your thoughts on Gino in the comments above, spurred by Finkelstein’s comments. Gino really is something else…
Also! Apologies, I didn’t mind if you posted this comment with my name. I was initially a bit harsh on the Cabello paper, but with the elaboration that you also posted, I think I gave the paper it’s rightful due. I do hope the paper has more caveats moving forward, the limitations of what the paper measures is just too strong, I think, to make the claims it does…
This is a reply to a recent comment by Matt Skaggs which I will write down here because I can’t reply anymore in that thread and the thread is becoming somewhat too extended over there.
Just wanted to note that I believe the “p-rep” you are mentioning was proposed as an alternative to the p-value. According to wikipedia it purports to compute the probability of replicating an effect. And wikipedia also mentions that several journals recommended reporting this p-rep rather than the classic p-value, but this is no longer the case.
And if I am not mistaken a blogpost on here dated march 8th, 2025 with the title “A Post Mortem on the Gino Case”: “Committing fraud is, right now, a viable career strategy that can propel you at the top of the academic world.” mentions Zoe Ziani and links to another blog where she tells her story and experience regarding the Gino case.
Andrew: Not to send you down a rabbit-hole again, but just for your information, Lessig has published another episode of his Gino podcast. He does discuss the class-year-is-Harvard data. I don’t think I’ll have time for a while to go through the claims in detail myself, so I’m not taking a position here on the merits of what he says, simply noting he’s put up more material on it.
https://lessig.substack.com/p/episode-4-dismantling-allegation
Seth:
Thanks. I’ll take a look. In the short description, it says, “This episode considers the first of the four papers found by Harvard to have involved intentional data manipulation. It doesn’t. None of the four do.” I’m skeptical that Lessig can be so sure that the data manipulation was unintentional. He didn’t say “There’s no proof that there was intentional data manipulation,” he flat out says it didn’t happen. I guess that’s lawyer-speak: you make a really strong claim and then dare the other side to contradict you?
Coincidentally, today’s post on our blog (which I wrote and scheduled months ago) is relevant to this discussion, not the bit about data manipulation but about the larger damage done by bad research.
OK, I took a look. I’m not impressed. Here’s one bit that annoyed me:
This seems like a classic “God of the gaps” ploy. There’s tons of evidence of research fraud, so try to muddy the waters by hypothesizing some other piece of evidence that isn’t there.
Also this:
I don’t know about that! Recall that Gino said that she “didn’t have anything to do with the data collection, data cleaning or data analysis” on multiple papers with data problems where she was a coauthor.
I read over the transcript as well as the original Data Colada analysis of that data. One thing Lessig says which I found somewhat convincing was that if you were manufacturing data, why would you put “Harvard” in the column for year in school (all the other entries are sensible responses, but the Harvard response would seem to draw attention to precisely these rows – sound like a particularly poor way to manufacture data entries).
The thing I found most unconvincing was Lessig’s tone. I thought there was too much hype, too much repetition, too much certainty, and too many assertions of lack of due process (this last part might well be a valid legal point, but I don’t have enough knowledge of the HBS investigation to gauge). Lawyers are prone to paint such black and white pictures, but I found it off-putting. It is also a podcast and so entertainment plays a part. But, for me, it undermined what might be valid counterpoints.
Andrew: The IP address issue is thinking about who might have made these entries. The IP address provides some (not dispositive) evidence. If it pointed to her, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t. There’s claims here I’d want to verify though. Did Harvard’s expert really not know how to do that forensics? It’s pretty basic stuff to anyone familiar with this sort of analytics. That would be quite a bad knock on them IF true. However, I don’t have time at the moment to chase it all down.
The defense then becomes she was incredibly sloppy, since she wrote this paper based on data that’s filled with nonsense, obviously so if anyone looked at it in detail. That’s rather sad in itself for what it says about this field. But the goal here is helping the client, and lawyers do what they have to do.
Dale wrote:
“the Harvard responses would seem to draw attention to precisely these rows – sounds like a particularly poor way to manufacture data entries.”
It should be pointed out here that Gino and Lessig are claiming that (1) her lab practices and version control were so sloppy that all sorts of people could have manipulated the data, and (2) the data manipulations were so amateurish that a brilliant person like her could not possibly have been so sloppy.
This recalls one aspect of her defamation suit. (Factoid for our foreign readers: in the US, a defamation case has a much higher burden of proof if the plaintiff is a “public figure.”) Gino’s lawyers filed a brief that began by describing how respected and famous she was, then in a later section of the brief argued that she was a humble professor and not a public figure. The judge ruled that she was a public figure before dismissing the case.
FYI, not to send down a rabbit hole again, but notable development, Bill Ackman (hedge fund billionaire) is involved on Gino’s side.
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/2006958483220955275
Very long. It starts: “Almost nothing makes my blood boil more than when a large powerful institution unfairly destroys someone’s reputation, and its principal reason for doing so is to minimize bad publicity in an effort to protect its own ‘reputation.’ … “
Wow, what an idiot. Maybe he can also take the side of the Surgisphere guys, the disgraced primatologist, and Jeffrey Epstein’s friends. Harvard has lots and lots of people who do bad science and know how to talk smoothly with rich people. Just pitiful to see someone with wealth, health, and security going down this rabbit hole. He should hop on the Ouija board and commune with the spirit of Henry Ford.
Thanks for posting that, Seth.
Ackman isn’t a lawyer, is he? A long diatribe with hardly any content. And I like how he threw in his own cheating scandal as if he was also among the legions of the falsely accused.
Lessig did an excellent job by lawyerly standards of completely avoiding the actual evidence while pretending it was something else. Thus a “scammer” who filled out multiple surveys was the cause of the bad data, without pointing out that this supposed scammer’s numbers were changed post hoc from values that did not support the hypothesized effect to ones that create the entire effect out of thin air.
It is easy to see why Gino sought out Ackman. She has zero chance of prevailing on the merits of her case, and she is hoping that Harvard is so afraid of Ackman that it will just roll over. As Ackman might say, I am going short on that one.
Matt: Right, Ackman isn’t a lawyer, he’s a very rich business guy. Proclaiming his involvement does solve the Mystery Of Money (how the defense was being funded). I have no idea if Gino has any reasonable legal claims on the parts of her case involving details of applicable policies or time limits for data examination. That’s way out of my area of expertise. What I do understand is technical topics such as metadata. Over the holidays, I actually went through some of the evidence again, with an eye toward what Lessig said in her defense. But I just gave up. There’s piles of stuff to sort through, and whatever I concluded, it’s just another opinion, with much more for me to lose than anything else.
FYI, not to encourage anyone to go down a rabbit hole again, but Lessig has posted another episode of The Gino Case podcast:
https://lessig.substack.com/p/new-episode-in-the-gino-case-posted
https://theginocase.info/
Wow, this is crazy. He writes, “This naive, childlike belief in process, in legal process, is just astonishing to me.” But he has a naive, childlike belief in the process of scientific publication.
I guess it makes sense that he has a naive, childlike belief in an aspect of society that’s often been idealized and which he has no direct experience.
Quote from above: “I guess it makes sense that he has a naive, childlike belief in an aspect of society that’s often been idealized and which he has no direct experience.”
That made me think of something I wrote concerning psychopathy and its possible connection to scientific misconduct and questionable practices. I reasoned being a scientist in and of itself might provide some sort of cover for psychopathic psychological scientists which may already put them at an advantage, because scientists are seen by some as being trustworthy, and as having good and noble intentions (cf. Goodstein, 2002, p. 31; James, 1995; Smaldino & McElreath, 2016, p. 6; Stapel, 2014, p. 189-190).
Some quotes from the references that might be relevant here:
From Goodstein (2002):
“As I mentioned earlier, I believe we scientists are guilty of promoting,or at least tolerating,a false popular image of ourselves.I like to call it the Myth of the Noble Scientist/” (p. 31)
From Smaldino & McElreath (2016):
“Our working assumption is that most researchers have internalized scientific norms of honest conduct and are trying their best to reveal true explanations of important phenomena. However, the evidence available is really insufficient.” (p. 6)
From fraudulent psychological scientist Stapel’s (translated to English) book (2014):
“Through my scientific cheating, I violated the trust that society in general and science in particular had placed in me, and torn away the veil of purity with which science covers itself. My behavior revealed that behind the respectable white-robed gentleman lurked a con artist, and suggested that maybe the revered status that society accords to science is sometimes based on quicksand. Is nothing sacred any more?” (p. 190)
Oh, the rabbit hole, the rabbit hole, this latest development in the Gino case is absolutely amazing. Harvard has made a legal motion about testimony from someone assisting Gino, and, well, he’s a lawyer (not Lessig) so I don’t think I should even try to describe it.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259933/gov.uscourts.mad.259933.207.0.pdf
Seth:
The question is, how many steps do we have to go before the inevitable endgame, which is Gino getting a Blagojevich-style federal pardon? The follow up would be Gino getting big research grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and a job as head of information security for Pershing Square Capital.