bwing

A lot of factors:

1) People definitely did get away with this, all the time. Historically, researchers had no obligation (at least that was practically enforced) to maintain and share their data and code. Peer review would check for specific methodological flaws and nothing deeper. If someone emailed you about your 1995 study in 2005, you'd say "I no longer have the code," or, more likely, simply never email them back.

2) In a highly competitive landscape where cheating is effective, the "winners" will be heavily selected for willingness to maximize the use of cheating. Even if only 1% of the population is willing to commit explicit fraud, that 1% is going to be heavily overrepresented in a world where explicit fraud gets you the top-tier publications that bring you to prominence.

3) Ariely and Gino both made millions of dollars from their fraud that they will not have to give back. It's worth emphasizing how poorly Ariely's fraud was executed -- he did the laziest possible fraud and easily converted it into money and prestige.

4) Related to the first point, it's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted since the '08-'12 time period. The replication crisis was just kicking into gear, and only among people who were paying attention to that type of thing. Ariely didn't come up reading Andrew Gelman's blog. There's simply far more light on any paper today than there would've been 10 years ago -- statistical and methodological understanding have come a long way as cohorts of academics came up in the shadow of the replication crisis. Having established credible groups like Data Colada to centralize these analyses has also been a big deal; tenured profs can't bully Data Colada by threatening their career progression the same way they could if accused via email by a random grad student.

My understanding is that the overall body of research suggests that artificial sweeteners don't cause additional calorie consumption. Given that is true (and leaving aside the much-studied question of other health risks from artificial sweeteners), it seems impossible that replacing some free sugars with NSS would not be beneficial for someone trying to increase calorie deficit and lose weight.

Think it's one of these things where the expected effect size is small and the measured output is multicausal, so observational studies simply won't be powerful enough to observe any real impact.

“NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health.” The classic public health advice: "Be More Virtuous." Correct, but not always maximally practical.

If anything, it reflects a greater degree of logical rigor:

1) It's commonly taken as a simple fact that overrepresentation of white people among e.g. the top hedge fund managers is evidence of society being structured in those people's favor

2) Jews are way more overrepresented among top hedge fund managers than non-Jewish whites

3) ...

Obviously the missing piece here is that (taken as a whole; obviously "Jews" comprises many different groups) Jewish people, on average, are culturally and genetically predisposed to success in intellectual fields. However, if you notice this but grow up in a climate where cultural and genetic reasons for group success are verboten, the nefarious explanations are the ones left.

There's no logical endpoint for "disparate group outcomes prove a problem that must be fixed" outside of discrimination against Asians and Jews. (It's an ineffective racist, white supremacist society that allows immigrant Asians and their descendants to outscore native whites on every metric of success used to prove the racism and white supremacy.)

Oh, transfermarkt is perfectly fine, and your general point about EPL money is definitely right -- just don't think it makes any sense to count pure transfer outlay without taking into account player sales.

You aren't "spending big" if you're spending 55m out of player trading revenue of 130m; you are (maybe) if you're spending 50m out of player trading revenue of 15m.

I'm not sure what metrics you're using for "spent around the same amount," but from preliminary looks at AC Milan vs. Brighton that doesn't seem true at all.

Breaking things down into transfer vs wages: over the past two seasons, Brighton have a net transfer profit of ~80m euros per Transfermarkt, while AC Milan have spent ~110m net, so 190m difference. (Stretching back further, you get to some seasons of 60m net spend by Brighton while they were trying to get promoted, but this is during a time when AC Milan's ownership spent 100m+ net a few seasons.)

And on wages, Milan pay substantively higher: Swiss Ramble, probably the top public football financial analyst, has Brighton's wage bill at 109m pounds (https://twitter.com/swissramble/status/1512310039956049920) for the 2021-22 season and AC Milan's wage bill at 169m euros (https://swissramble.substack.com/p/milan-202122-finances).

Now -- Brighton are shrewdly run, but I doubt it's sustainable for any club to consistently show the kind of short-term player trading profit that Cucurella + whatever they get for Caicedo and Mac Allister represent. Given the owner's background, I would expect Brighton to continue to be solidly above-average, but other clubs have data analysts and scouts and such too (and are capable of just copying Brighton's strategy inasmuch as it's reverse-engineerable from outcomes).

good lol

yes

This overestimates the role of international soccer in predicting future international soccer success. Players get 99% of their development with their club teams. While it is crucial for Americans to regularly play good teams, this experience is mostly going to happen in top European leagues and the Champions League.

And we're in the midst of a huge boom period for Americans in Europe, with young Americans playing regularly for perennial Champions League teams Dortmund, Barcelona, Chelsea, Juventus, and Leipzig, a handful of starters on quality teams behind them, and major European teams spending more and more resources scouting American prospects.

Player quality is the main driver of international success: Belgium went from 57th-ranked in 2010 to 1st-ranked in 2015 (yes, FIFA rankings are bad, but they point to something real) not because of some change in scheduling philosophy but because they had a bunch of great players in 2015.

Yeah, this has been one of the most disappointing things for me. No way his shtick has fooled all of them.

Pg in particular I would've expected more rigor from, but maybe that's naivete, or the inevitable awkwardness that comes from him living both in the world of high epistemic standards (his essays) and zero epistemic standards with rampant dishonesty (startup/VC culture). To me, the latter undermines the former, but I also am not a rich thought leader.

To be frank: I think the main reason is because explicit talk of cost-cutting was at odds with leadership's self-aggrandizing Twitter talk. (Disrupting the education industry, putting four-year colleges out of business, etc.)

It's only a double standard if you're assuming the people critical of Lambda aren't also critical of selling valueless $200k college educations to checked-out students.

Because they have minimal admissions filter and constantly tell students not to give up, to fight imposter syndrome, student testimonials, "this is the toughest thing you'll ever do but it's so worth it."

College is gated by GPA and standardized test scores. You can quibble over the effectiveness and wisdom of this specific gate, but the upside is that mediocre students aren't going to spend a year and $30,000 convincing themselves they're going to major in CS at MIT. At Lambda, students quit their jobs, and take months out of their lives, only to find out 4 months later that programming isn't for them.

I was at Lambda when they announced the switch from 9 to 6 months and the elimination of paid team leaders. The feedback was universally negative. In a channel for open student discussion, Austen Allred deleted a poll from Slack because of how lopsided the reaction was. He explained the deletion by saying the poll was "misleading."

Students then got a survey "explaining" why the change was actually a good thing by asking questions such as "Do you understand why companies value mentoring experience?" Not just failing to reveal the truth (these were cost-cutting measures), but not even taking the effort to come up with a convincing lie.

It was destabilizing: Austen's twitter account would read ambitious, hyperoptimistic; meanwhile, drastic changes would be made within the program with vague rationales ("after speaking with hiring managers, we've made these changes..."), and probing further simply got deflections or gaslighting surveys.

There were a ton of good people in the program, and I learned a lot there. But fundamentally there needs to be trust between institution and student when you're asking people to make this level of time and financial commitment. And at no point did I feel like Lambda at its top level prioritized student wellbeing over PR, costs, or metrics to be sold to investors.

https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n...

samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful

The reason for this is almost exclusively the Earned Income Tax Credit. A single filer claiming two children and earning $11,000 would be eligible for a (fully refundable) credit of $4,410. While this credit distributes a ton of needed benefit to low-income working families, I'm sure you can see where there's a strong incentive to defraud the system here. Both unscrupulous individuals and tax preparers can make a substantial amount of money quickly.

Since you can claim self-employment income without documentation, regular audits are necessary to prove actual income. It's also common for people to claim children who don't truly qualify; again, this would only be provable through actual audits.

In contrast, the average middle-class taxpayer tends to have both less built-in incentive to game the system and less flexibility (as most of their income will be documented to the IRS).

To defend the IRS a bit more: this program is in some ways an administrative model. Taxpayers don't need to prove any need to claim the credit. There aren't multiple rounds of paperwork, and, if you aren't audited, the only interfacing you have to do with the bureaucracy is in submitting your tax return, and you'll have money deposited in your bank account in a week. It may be the most effective welfare program, even accounting for audits (many of which are triggered by obvious red flags) in its ratio of benefits to "hoops needed to jump through."