False claims in a widely-cited paper

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/false-claims-in-a-published-no-corrections-no-consequences-welcome-to-the-business-school/

by qsi • 4 months ago

341 142 4 months ago

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

paulpauper2• 4 months ago

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

sillysaurusx2• 4 months ago

and actually good and original stuff gets rejected

This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true?

In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context.

Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.

qsi2• 4 months ago

Ooops, sorry... I cannot edit the URL in the submission. I should have checked.

hansvm• 4 months ago

good stuff rejected, are you sure that's true

In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either.

Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example:

One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in.

[0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...

Aperocky2• 4 months ago

For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc.

But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.

JoeOfTexas• 4 months ago

Status quo changes at the speed of snail.

MarkusQ2• 4 months ago

"For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to [...]including practices such as peer review"

Nitpick: peer review as we know it is only about fifty years old.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&...

zer00eyz• 4 months ago

and actually good and original stuff gets rejected

This isnt a new thing though.

Cantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th... they didnt just reject him, they basically publicly beat him down, and drove him away from math and into depression.

David Bohm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential spent years on the outside for having his ideas on this.

Geoffrey Hinton: was considered a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc).

Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972...

Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.

bsder• 4 months ago

Katalin Karikó and her work on mRNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3

Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.

BobbyTables2• 4 months ago

Even in more respected journals, peer review is often done by beleaguered grad students who could be still relatively new to the field. They lack the experience to look at things with a critical eye.

tylerhou• 4 months ago

Graduate students! Hah! ML researchers can only hope their papers at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPs are reviewed by graduate students!

t0lo• 4 months ago

So we're firmly in the era of few people caring about few things now aren't we.

lotsofpulp• 4 months ago

I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.

erikerikson• 4 months ago

I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...

austinjp• 4 months ago

Oh I'm sure the grifters will find ways in. The other disciplines may have provided a "moat" for the past few decades, but it won't last forever.

p-e-w• 4 months ago

I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results.

Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.

Georgelemental• 4 months ago

Quantum physics, due to its own "difficulty of observing and measuring", has its fair share of nonsense too

chromacity• 4 months ago

I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).

Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.

hnburnsy• 4 months ago

  If it doesn't have "science" in the name, it's a science 
  If it has the suffix "logy", it's a semi-science
  If it has the word "science", it's not

sigbottle• 4 months ago

Observing, measuring, but also repeatability and ground truth.

Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.

I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)

To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.

suzzer99• 4 months ago

Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.

I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:

The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”

I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.

Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.

wavemode2• 4 months ago

There's plenty of results in math and physics that are true, in the sense that the math checks out, but are useless, in the sense that the authors claim they've made a breakthrough, but actually they've just tweaked a few parameters of an existing unverified theory and constructed a new unverified theory. (If you've ever read a news headline like "physicists now believe reality may actually have 400 dimensions!", they were probably citing one of these papers.)

There are also plenty of physics papers where, the math actually just doesn't check out at all. But those, at least, rarely make it into headlines or reputable journals.

foweltschmerz• 4 months ago

disheartening

ChrisArchitect• 4 months ago

cleaned up url: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/false-clai...

(if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)

internetter• 4 months ago

dang could you change the link

cwillu2• 4 months ago

hn doesn't have tags; email hn@ycombinator.com (which is what the submitter did)

ls612• 4 months ago

Management Science, how am I not surprised? They have the worst rep of any Econ/Econ adjacent field for good reason.

SanjayMehta4• 4 months ago

Management, Political, Economic, Social Sciences are not sciences.

tovej11• 4 months ago

Social sciences definitely are.

banana_sandwich• 4 months ago

“Professionals” in traffic engineering still religiously cling to “standards” that are largely based on BS served up by auto companies pre 1940.

Many such cases of this, it seems.

komali24• 4 months ago

At least your traffic engineers set standards. In Taiwan often the standards come straight from the legislative yuan, aka just vibes laws from people who are driven around in private cars their whole lives.

nativeit• 4 months ago

Don’t worry, we’re getting there. They just started dismantling what they refer to as the “administrative state”, but which largely deferred substantial questions requiring skill and non-partisan judgement to their respective experts. It was never perfect, nor free from partisan and/or economic concerns, but the replacement appears to be self-interested narcissists and sycophants and their personal fiefdoms, with precious little space for competence, logic, or integrity.

melagonster• 4 months ago

This is just for reference: last time someone tried to address this issue, they found that no one was willing to vote for them again...

Analemma_• 4 months ago

The consequences here don’t seem all that bad, it’s just a silly management fad. By contrast, “Growth in a Time of Debt” from Reinhardt and Rogoff steered multiple national governments into pointless self-destructive and immiserating austerity, despite being equally bunk, and none of the authors ever saw any consequences for that either. You can’t even blame that one on “management science”, it was a straight macroeconomics paper.

There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.

malshe• 4 months ago

That paper wasn’t even peer reviewed. If I remember it correctly it was published in the AER Papers and Proceedings.

qsera• 4 months ago

political? what about business? If junk science can help a huge market to keep selling, I think it will be the biggest blocker.

tdeck• 4 months ago

pointless

I'm sure it benefitted some people.

dannyobrien• 4 months ago

So, I was interested in this statement, and looked into it barely, and on one side, its conclusions were replicated in a number of other papers[1] (despite the headlines, three years after its publication, of a simple calculation error)[2]. I'll state that neither of these points are a slam-dunk if you're a member of one political side or another. If you're a believer in austerity, you'll look at the corroborating studies; if you think that was a bad policy choice, you can argue that they're all junk science, pushed out by supporters of the status quo.

I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.

[1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190

contubernio• 4 months ago

Silly management fads waste huge amounts of time and resources and generate all manner of perverse incentives. They entrench institutional mediocrity as much as anything.

arjie• 4 months ago

There's this 'criterion of embarrassment' / 'cui bono' sort of standard[0] that really helps judge these things. So many people perform science that seems to always confirm the positions they've held. All the "society is terrible today" people like to quote LendingClub's "70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" without knowing it's LendingClub content marketing. The snail darter guy happened to find a novel species that is endangered and genetically identical to a non-endangered one just in the place where he was trying to get a dam banned. The sustainability guys find that companies that focus on sustainability do better. The diversity guys find that companies that focus on diversity do better. A scientist who gets a grant from Philip Morris finds that cigarettes aren't bad for you.

It reminds me of something my dad said while watching Generation Kill - a TV show adapted from the written work of an embedded journalist in Iraq. The show, made by Americans, depicts the US armed forces as ramified through with bumbling fools seeking glory with a few competent people in there. So we finish watching the series and my dad says "Only the Americans would make a show like this" and it's somewhat[1] true. I think perhaps that being able to create a machine that tells you the truth is crucial to success and I feel that the US's peak period as unipolar hegemon (Gulf War I to the end of Obama I) this was more the case than it is today, though this is more of a feeling than anything I have verified.

It also reminds me of an old sort of censorship, one which George Orwell talks about in regards to Animal Farm[2] - a book that was criticized because it perhaps harmed the greater cause of communism. There's too much to quote in his essay because I find the whole thing worthy of reading, but here's one bit:

Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest.

...

Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ʻYesʼ. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ʻHow about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?ʼ, and the answer more often than not will be ʻNoʼ. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses.

There is even today an orthodoxy of sorts and if you were to contradict it, it is considered sinful to say so. I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people. Could such a thing be published if it were true? People often say "what are you going to do with that information?" and somehow I don't share that view that all science must necessarily immediately deliver applied benefit. Knowing is good for its own sake. Truth is good for its own sake. Or at least that's what I believe.

I suppose I'll only know through the period of my own life whether this belief is adaptive. Who knows, a present or future power might be one formed entirely through inaccurate data and information[3], and we might be as Orks and painting things red might make them faster because we believe it so in sufficient numbers.

0: Obviously there are limits. Eli Lilly benefits from GLP-1RA drugs working well but they do in fact work well.

1: Others obviously also make fun of themselves, but something like In The Loop parodies specific people more than the whole machine and its participants. Generation Kill feels much more real a depiction of large organizations and their incentive mechanisms - especially how they grind forward and get the outcomes they want despite everything else. Perhaps my least favourite parts were the emotional-breakdown bits at the end, which I've since found out that the participants themselves said were invented for TV.

2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm

3: Open societies like ours have the problem that external misdirection leaks into internal data but perhaps with sufficient computerization we can keep separate truth and propaganda within the structure of government

bluefirebrand• 4 months ago

I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people

This is an interesting thought experiment.

I'd like to think that if such a thing was discovered, we would investigate why this is the case. I'd like to believe that we wouldn't just accept this as some kind of de-facto truth, and start treating Indians as lesser

I'm an idealist I guess though

smcin• 4 months ago

On the study of management in the military, what does West Point think of HBS, and v.v.? (for example, were the fictitious body counts in the Vietnam War comparable/earlier/later than civilian management doing dubious things with metrics/OKRs?)

Alternatively, what is the most heterodox institute studying management, esp. in the military?

pjdesno2• 4 months ago

Are there any factual allegations on that page? All I could find was "the method described in the paper is not the method the authors actually used", without any elaboration.

I'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."

karel-3d• 4 months ago

There is a replication study of the Andrew Kling who made the claim of false claims first, I guess there is more info there

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4648438

dash2• 4 months ago

Management Studies is the top management journal, it is highly regarded and would count as fairly prestigious in e.g. tenure applications.

jkman• 4 months ago

It is elaborated on in the first linked article in this one, under the section "Research Integrity Offices (Part 1)".

altairprime• 4 months ago

Previously on HN, the referenced paper:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151

(2 months ago, 374 comments)

ernsheong• 4 months ago

I'm very confused because there are 2 Andrews, the author in the blog post only states "Andrew", and by the list of Authors the author seems to be Andrew Gelman, but the slug in the first link is "aking", and then there is also Andrew King, lol.

flexagoon• 4 months ago

Andrew King seems to be the person who published the original exposé of the paper:

The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King [...]

zimpenfish• 4 months ago

the author in the blog post only states "Andrew"

If you click on that "Andrew", it takes you to [0] which is clear that it's Gelman.

[0] https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/

zx80802• 4 months ago

Somewhat unrelated but relevant thought: from software engineering experience in large orgs, correction of any issue rarely worth any effort. AI will drive commiting more and more papers with less and less review. The review takes effort, too much in the age of easy generation.

With this, science will probably lose trust even more in the coming years.

rectang• 4 months ago

Brandolini's Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is the adage for our age:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

bonesss• 4 months ago

I’m cautiously optimistic that LLMs have a role in addressing that asymmetry to the side of good faith actors.

Gish galloping bad faith trolls aren’t new. LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But now, We Have The Technology, refuting a pile of poo semi-accurately should be cheap (or at least getting cheaper).

I don’t need an LLM on my phone that can do tax law in Georgia the country. But an “AI Assistant” that could highlight logical fallacies, shifting goalposts, non-responsive dialog, rhetorical obfuscations, etc, would be useful online, at the bar, and work (ie when HR tries to “HR” you, but also is lying and obfuscating about it).

We already have models and people that bullshit. Maybe refutation models are the cure… Chinese needle snakes to catch the lizards, Gorillas to catch the snakes…

zx80802• 4 months ago

Hey, don't take kids joy! The paper was cited thousands of times, lots of uni students built their early career using it!

rudderdev• 4 months ago

Peer reviews need to be more transparent and accountable. Otherwise, we are sure to lose to the misinformation war that is rapidly reaching its peak, thanks but no thanks to AI.

thayne3• 4 months ago

How would you do that? One reason peer reviews are usually anonymous is to prevent retribution (ex. rejecting someone's paper, because they rejected yours). Not that it is perfect at doing that, but if you make it more transparent, you may trade one problem for another.

thayne3• 4 months ago

their policies allow only authors to request corrections

Say what now?

So the only way to get a correction for a paper is if the author is willing to publicly admit they messed up? Something that an unethical researcher is very unlikely to do.

bradley13• 4 months ago

Some years ago, my institution (primarily a teaching college) decided it needed an additional accreditation. The organization they went with requires faculty to publish. Including our undergrad business faculty.

We all know that "publish or perish" is stupid. The premier example of Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Why can't our highly paid administration understand this?

flowerthoughts• 4 months ago

They were pressured from somewhere to show results. They had to invent a metric to be able to prove they make results. It was easier to ask the neighbour what they are measuring, than to think it through and form a synthesis. If it works for the Jones', it'll work for us.

InkCanon• 4 months ago

I think a more useful version of the law is

"Any good measure requires a good person."

For example, a good measure of research is to have an intelligent faculty member or members read it and decide if it's good. Converting it to a mechanical calculation is fundamentally bad.

pas3• 4 months ago

What's undergrad business faculty? The people who teach undergrads or undergrad TAs?

ANarrativeApe• 4 months ago

Stop buying from/submitting to discredited publishers.

zahlman• 4 months ago

Some problems with that: "discredited" isn't a binary; memes (in the original sense) from papers circulate easily even if nobody pays the publishers (the problem is arguably even worse, because people will read abstracts for free and distort the claims further); there might not be higher quality alternatives.

froh• 4 months ago

oh how I'd love to see a gitlab GitHub like infrastructure and culture for scientific publication. let them have the repo private/authors and reviewers only until publication.

but all flaws are issues, later reported issues are right next to the paper, heck there could even badges for publication and review status...

a woman may dream...

neurotroph• 4 months ago

There is: https://osf.io/

fergie• 4 months ago

As somebody who has spent a bit of time in academia, I have often been slightly alarmed by some of the research (and opinon) that comes out of business schools. One thing is that it is often unsubstantiated and just plain wrong, another is that it often seems like the authors kind of know it, almost as if they are intentionally pandering to a lowbrow/midwit audience, and they expect everybody else to be in on the game. Its mystifying.

Lionga• 4 months ago

Not at all limited to business schools

asplake• 4 months ago

I had the privilege last night of attending a lecture given by Prof Sir John Kay (Obliquity, Radical Uncertainty, etc). He was scathing on two points: 1) the way the world changed in the 1970s from management as responsibility to leadership as prize, and 2) the abject failure of business schools to develop a serious body of knowledge. Taken together, business schools have become cash cows for universities while still being held in disdain by academia. This from the first dean of Oxford's Said Business School.

AdamN• 4 months ago

There was tremendous resistance to setting up that school both because of where the money came from but more so because of the possibility that the school would not actually be academic but more 'professional' instead. I can't comment on the former as it seems mostly just xenophobic but maybe there are other angles there. The latter is definitely a concern though.

ycombinete• 4 months ago

Business school writing frequently smells like Post hoc rationalisation to me (with some confirmation bias mixed in).

beezlebroxxxxxx• 4 months ago

I took one class in the business department while I was in university and it felt like basically "business" anthropology without any of the reflection that the field of anthropology has done about its own research and the limits/biases of their claims.

The "scholarly" aspect and the standards were comical compared to other fields (even compared to some standards in other fields that I consider pretty suspect).

f30e3dfed1c9• 4 months ago

Two out of three authors from Harvard Business School. The place is practically a horseshit factory.

anshulbasia27• 4 months ago

The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...

jltsiren• 4 months ago

The policy is what you would expect from a journal that is effectively run by volunteers. While the publisher has paid employees, the editorial board in charge of the journal itself seems to consist of volunteers.

When you have a volunteer organization, the impact on people's personal lives is one of the main factors driving decisions. You try to avoid getting involved in somebody else's controversies, as the impact is almost always negative.

From that perspective, the policy seems clear. The authors are responsible for their papers. If someone else claims that a paper should be corrected, they are free to write a paper of their own. That way no volunteer has to take responsibility for someone else's claims.

pas3• 4 months ago

They could at least send the paper with the reported problems out to a new set of referees.

And just as they decided to take responsibility for publishing, they can take responsibility after a similar review for retraction (or issuing an errata or whatever fancy way they want to signal the result of the process).

gus_massa2• 4 months ago

This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth.

Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know.

In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots.

Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while.

In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source.

Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit.

From the article:

> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.

graemep2• 4 months ago

There is a big difference between something that just turns out to be wrong, and something that is dishonestly or negligently wrong.

For example, AFAIK, Wakefield's paper claiming MMR causes autism was eventually retracted by the editors of The Lancet.

chermi• 4 months ago

"Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know."

What does that have to do with this situation? I'm honestly trying to figure out your chain of thought. Do you think the future should have an impact on the present somehow? The fraud in the op post happened at the time of publication. Oh and btw. No fraud in the two you cited. Unless you figured out how to apply future to present. In which case they probably would've published much better papers, somehow.

chithanh2• 4 months ago

Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide.

Medicine never figured this out. The medical community put Semmelweis in a lunatic asylum, because physicians' ego could not accept the fact that their unclean hands were causing harm to patients. Semmelweis' modern peers continue to let millions of patients die preventable deaths due to errors in medical decisionmaking, and ego plus institutional inertia prevents serious measures against it (most notably fatigue management).

Academia is not any better though. There was the recent high-profile retraction of a publication on opioid exposure via human breastmilk which was widely cited and the basis for many child custody decisions: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/canadian-pediatric-so...

toraway• 4 months ago

Semmelweis died approximately 100 years before the thalidomide scandal so not sure what that is supposed to prove…

(other than being a favorite go-to of numerous quacks and charlatans who insist that modern medicine is similarly persecuting them).

throw3108222• 4 months ago

There's a simple rule of thumb that seems obvious to me but is widely ignored: we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values- or between what is and what we think should be. Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values, which makes any coincidence between the two extremely suspicious.

b00ty4breakfast2• 4 months ago

Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values...

what? that's nonsense. Not everybody's values are the same, for one thing. Especially as society has become more and more international.

You should be equally skeptical of any result until proper evidence is presented and verified. Values should have no bearing either way on empirical truth-claims.

throw3108222• 4 months ago

Exactly, you're saying the exact same thing that I am. "Orthogonal" means independent, unrelated. This is why coincidence is very suspicious, because it's statistically very improbable.

Beestie• 4 months ago

Stopped reading not long after noticing the title of the paper in question.

The very hypothesis is laughable. It is completely irrelevant if the hypothesis is supported or not.

That paper is like flypaper for anyone seeking affirmation of sustainability policies.

I could write a paper tomorrow claiming that [insert conspiracy theory here] is absolutely true and why Big [insert hated industry here] doesn't want you to know the truth and it would be cited until the earth crashes into the sun.

It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation.

I could write a paper about that but wouldn't hold my breath on getting any cites.

bregma• 4 months ago

It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation.

But... that's exactly what Big Academia doesn't want you to know.

pas3• 4 months ago

the hypothesis seems pretty important and interesting, even if hard to study (and hard to classify companies, and sustainability, way too many degrees of freedom, so it would need preregistration, etc)

mgkuhn• 4 months ago

I thought the proper way to correct questionable results is to conduct and publish a follow-up study that independently looks at the same question with better data and better methodology. And wait until multiple independent teams have done the same. And then write a meta-analysis on the emerging pool of independent papers.

That's how scientific consent is normally formed, at least in rigorous disciplines like experimental physics or medicine. A single paper in the end is going to be just a single data point in any such meta-analysis study.

fabian2k• 4 months ago

It depends on whether the paper is simply wrong for some reason, or if there is either fraud or a fundamental mistake in the procedure. But in general you're right, retractions are not the way to handle most scientific disputes.

Your point about consensus unfortunately doesn't quite work in cases like this were the people using the paper are not scientists. They're not continuing work in the same area, people are using this paper to support their arguments.

Asooka• 4 months ago

What does it matter that the claims are "false" if claiming them as the truth results in encouraging the society we wish to exist? That paper is a cornerstone of sustainability initiatives, if you retract it, you might as well set the whole Earth on fire. To hell with integrity, I say, it's time to do some good for the world!

False claims in a widely-cited paper

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