I’ve spent a lot of time mocking Mark Hauser on this blog, and I still find it annoying that, according to the accounts I’ve seen, he behaved unethically toward his graduate students and lab assistants, he never apologized for manipulating data, and, perhaps most unconscionably, he wasted the lives of who knows how many monkeys in discredited experiments.
But, fine, nobody’s perfect. On the plus side—and I’m serious about this—it seems that Hauser was not kidding when, upon getting kicked out of his position as a Harvard professor, he said he’d be working with at-risk kids.
Here’s the website for his organization, Risk Eraser. I’m in no position to evaluate this work, and I’d personally think twice before hiring someone with a track record of faking data, but I looked at the people listed on his advisory board and they include Steven Pinker and Susan Carey, two professors in the Harvard Psychology Department. This is notable because Hauser dragged that department into the muck, and Pinker and Carey, as much as almost anybody, would have reason to be angry with him. But they are endorsing his new project. This suggest that these two well-respected researchers, who know Hauser much better than I do (that is, more than zero!) have some trust in him, they think his project is real and that it’s doing some good.
That’s wonderful news. Hauser is clearly a man of many talents, even if experimental psychology is not his strong point, and, no joke, no sarcasm at all, I’m so happy to see that he is using these talents productively. He’s off the academic hamster wheel and doing something real with his life. An encouraging example for Michael Lacour, Diederik Stapel, Jonah Lehrer, Team Power Pose, Team Himmicanes, and all the rest. (I think Weggy and Dr. Anil Potti are beyond recovery, though.)
We all make mistakes in various aspects of life, and let’s hope we can all turn things around in the manner of Marc Hauser, to forget about trying to be a “winner” and to just move forward and help others. I imagine Hauser is feeling good about this life shift as well, taking the effort he was spending trying to be a public intellectual and to stay ahead of the curve in science, and just trying to help others.
P.S. You might feel that I’m being too hard on Hauser here: even while celebrating his redemption I can’t resist getting in some digs on his data manipulation. But that’s kinda the point: even if Hauser has not fully reformed his ways, maybe especially if that is the case, his redemption is an inspiring story. In reporting this I’m deliberately not oversimplifying; I’m not trying to claim that Hauser has resolved all his issues. He still, to my knowledge, has shown neither contrition nor even understanding of why it’s scientifically and professionally wrong to lie about and hide your data. But he’s still moved on to something useful (at least, I’ll take the implicit word of Carey and Pinker on this one, I don’t know any of these people personally). And that’s inspiring. It’s good to know that redemption can be achieved even without a full accounting for one’s earlier actions.
P.P.S. Some commenters share snippets from Hauser’s Risk Eraser program and some of it sounds kinda hype-y. So perhaps I was too charitable in my quick assessment above.
Hauser may be “trying to help others” (as I wrote above), but that doesn’t mean his methods will actually help.
For example, they offer “the iWill game kit, a package of work-out routines that can help boost your students’ willpower through training.” And then they give the following reference:
Baumeister, R.F. (2012). Self-control: the moral muscle. The Psychologist.
We’ve heard of this guy before; he’s in the can’t replicate and won’t admit it club. Also this, which looks like another PPNAS-style mind-over-matter bit of p-hacking:
Job, V., Walton, G.M., Bernecker, K. & Dweck, C.S. (2013). Beliefs about willpower determine the impact of glucose on self-control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
OK, so what’s going on here? I was giving Hauser the benefit of the doubt because of the endorsements from Pinker and Carey, who are some serious no-bullshit types.
But maybe that inference was a mistake on my part. One possibility is that Pinker and Carey fell for the Ted-talking Baumeuster PPNAS hype, just like so many others in their profession. Another possibility is that they feel sorry for Hauser and agreed to be part of his program as a way to help out their old friend. This one seems hard to imagine—given what Hauser did to the reputation of their department, I’d think they’d be furious at the guy, but who knows?
Too bad. I really liked the story of redemption, but this Risk Eraser thing seems not so different from what Hauser was doing before: shaky science and fast talking, with the main difference being that this time he’s only involved in the “fast talking” part. Baumeister indeed. Why not go whole hog and start offering power pose training and ESP?
Deplorable but not irredeemable?
More generally, you seem to love mocking people on the blog? I do admit most of the targets did stuff that makes it an easy argument that they deserve what they get.
But still. The whole thing seems kinda sad and in bad taste. It seems to me like kicking someone who’s already down. Notwithstanding your noble intentions.
We need some equivalent of someone restarting a new life in the penal colonies in the old days without having your past hound you for ever.
Perhaps you think of these posts as a deterrent? If only they knew they’d be hounded for life they may not have cheated in the first place? Perhaps. Maybe it will stop others from doing it. Still seems kinda sad to dwell and keep harping on the whole thing.
Rahul:
Hauser has still, to my knowledge, shown neither contrition nor even understanding of why it’s scientifically and professionally wrong to lie about and hide your data.
I see no reason why he should care if I mock him. He’s just mockable. “Evilicious,” indeed. Perhaps because I’m a statistician it particularly bugs me when people screw around with data in this way, and it’s tacky as hell for him to not even admit the problem after he’s been caught.
P.S. Check out, for example, this non-apology apology from Hauser in 2012:
Here’s the best part:
So, Dr. Jekyll wasn’t directly involved. He takes responsibility for being too busy to supervise that damn Mr. Hyde guy who was doing all that data manipulation!
When exposed all these guys contact a lawyer. My guess is most of this “confession” is attorney-scripted.
Whatever be our moral outrage to this sort of statement my impression is it is fairly typical legal advice.
Rahul:
In any case, I sincerely hope he’s doing good work with these at-risk kids.
That was the point of my post: the man is seriously flawed and still doesn’t seem to recognize either the scientific or the moral dimensions of his actions—but he may be doing useful work now. If that’s the case, it’s inspiring, and I wanted to make that point without whitewashing his earlier offenses.
In a more general sense, your noble desire in such cases seems to be for absolute contrition, to take responsibility & for people to admit the problem.
Sounds great in principle. But I’m wondering if that approach will not often or always be at odds with the constitutional right against self incrimination?
If a full confession pragmatically could mean harsher legal penalties is it fair for us to ask that of people? Isn’t that hypocritical?
Or do I mis-understand what the 5th Amendment means?
I tend towards agreeing with Rahul. I think it’s in principle OK if he starts over and this shouldn’t be made to haunt him forever now. He paid a price for his mistakes (there are many still sitting in their jobs despite engaging in similar misconduct). If he refuses to acknowledge them, that’s probably because people don’t like admitting they did anything wrong (or maybe it’s for legal reasons as Rahul suggests). (The Maryland linguist who defended Hauser on Gelman’s blog some time ago on the grounds that Hauser’s work has been validated in subsequent research was a particularly low point for linguistics in this whole saga and left me embarrassed for my field).
I do find it really tacky though that Hauser, and Pinker by extension, offer “brain strengthening/sharpening exercises”. This is again entering the area of fraud. Being associated with such a fraudulent activity as “brain strengthening/sharpening exercises” could drag Pinker down as well.
What is with Harvard anyway? It seems to be packed with all these questionable people. Cuddy, Hauser, Gilbert (who thinks that psych’s replication rate is indistinguishable from 100% or something like that). The kosher scientists (“some, I assume, are good people”, to quote Trump) there must be getting very uncomfortable.
Here is their blurb:
“We work with you to strengthen your students’ executive capacity, bulding [sic] up the systems that enable self-control, attention, working memory and planning. The sciences show that there are large individual differences in these capacities, but independently of a child’s starting point, we can strengthen these capacities. Why? Because of the plasticity of the brain — its ability to change as a result of specific experiences. We have developed and collated a suite of brain sharpening exercises, using a combination of computer technology, physical exercise, and games. Because students enjoy these exercises, they sharpen their ability to focus, stay in control, and plan ahead, all while having fun.”
After reading this, I can feel a Ted talk coming up.
If a company makes an outlandish claim like this, shouldn’t they be investigated by the authorities for selling fake ideas? I think this has happened before to other companies selling brain strengthening exercises. I have to agree with Andrew that in order to sell the idea of brain strengthening, Hauser is probably going to have to deploy his considerable skills in just making stuff up.
And here’s another text from the “Playbook” of this company:
“Lastly, we take a look back, returning to the evidence, checking on the results, assessing the successes and failures, revising methods, and then moving forward with more refined approaches. Although there is no endpoint to this process, each program moves towards higher and higher levels of success, with healthier children, more energized staff, and more creative programs.”
Basically, it is already predetermined that every case will be a win-win, moving to “higher and higher levels of success”. Failure is not an option, folks. God, I miss America so much!
I think I misrepresented Andrew when I wrote the last sentence; of course Andrew didn’t say such a thing, I did. It does seem that this business is business as usual for Hauser, though. Once a faker, always a faker? He could have learnt something from his mistakes, as in, don’t make overblown claims.
With respect, maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to offer praise for this new endeavor just yet? The target group to be helped are “at-risk youth”, and the program is called “Risk-Eraser”?? Google offers the following definition:
>An “at-risk” student is generally defined as a student who is likely to fail at school. In this context, school failure is typically seen as dropping out of school before high school graduation.
The treatment offered ostensibly claims to “erase” such risk, presumably to zero. Otherwise, why is the word “erase” being used? Is there not then an implicit scientific claim of 100% efficacy, with respect to the identified risk factors?
I respect and admire Steven Pinker enormously. Still, with a brand name like “Risk-Eraser”, there really does seem to be potential for emotional manipulation of the gullible and/or desperate here. I would be curious to know what the fee structures involved are, as well the underlying strength of these very forceful implicit claims being made. I couldn’t quickly find any research citations on their website.
John Profumo was a british politician caught in a scandal in the 60’s. Afterwards he apparently disappeared to do volunteer charity work for the next 40 years. Here’s how wikipedia described the scandal and the rest of his life:
“The Profumo affair was a British political scandal that originated with a brief sexual relationship in 1961 between John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan’s government, and Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old would-be model. In March 1963, Profumo denied any impropriety in a personal statement[n 1] to the House of Commons, but was forced to admit the truth a few weeks later. He resigned from the government and from Parliament. The repercussions of the affair severely damaged Macmillan’s self-confidence, and he resigned as prime minister on health grounds in October 1963. His Conservative Party was marked by the scandal, which may have contributed to its defeat by Labour in the 1964 general election.”
and this is what he did after:
“Shortly after his resignation Profumo began to work as a volunteer cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London, and continued to work there for the rest of his life.[1] Peter Hitchens has written that Profumo “vanished into London’s East End for 40 years, doing quiet good works”.[15] Profumo “had to be persuaded to lay down his mop and lend a hand running the place”, eventually becoming Toynbee Hall’s chief fundraiser, and used his political skills and contacts to raise large sums of money. All this work was done as a volunteer, since Profumo was able to live on his inherited wealth. His wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, also devoted herself to charity until her death in 1998. In the eyes of most commentators, Profumo’s charity work redeemed his reputation. His friend, social reform campaigner Lord Longford said he ‘felt more admiration [for Profumo] than [for] all the men I’ve known in my lifetime'”
After reading these comments, I became more curious about the nature of this new company. Risk-Eraser LLC is a for-profit company. That is all I can really find. But, combined with the other comments made, I think it is premature to pronounce Hauser’s new endeavor as “doing some good.” It is admirable that he wants to work with at-risk kids, but it could be taking advantage of at-risk kids. Not so admirable. Absent evidence, I see little reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps if I was more of a Bayesian, I’d be inclined to say that my prior is based on his earlier escapades and I see little to change that so far.
Dale:
See P.P.S. above. Maybe you’re right. It seems I may have but too much weight on the endorsements from Pinker and Carey. It may be that they felt bad for Hauser after what happened at Harvard so they decided to be nice to him on this one. In the same way that your boss, after firing you, might write you a positive letter of recommendation.
>Perhaps if I was more of a Bayesian, I’d be inclined to say that my prior is based on his earlier escapades and I see little to change that so far.
Yes, my thoughts exactly as well. I didn’t want to be overly negative in my comment above. My sister is a clinical psychologist, and one of her maxims is “People can change. At the same time, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”
Just curious, is that different from someone basing his prior on a person’s color or race? Why?
Isn’t it different because a person’s race or color or gender is a property of a group of people and whatever imagined attributes that group has may not apply to the individual at hand? Whereas with an individual’s behavior comes from the same individual, it is not a property of a group? If someone thinks that blacks have a higher probability of committing a crime, one still needs to maintain a vague prior when one meets a new individual from that group. Not so when evaluating an individual’s behavior; there, the prior may reasonably be shaped by their own past behavior. But obviously one has to wait for new data to see if the prior holds up (in the case of Risk-Eraser, it definitely does hold up).
We are talking currently about Hauser’s past and current behavior. It sounds like you are questioning the fairness or appropriateness of potentially drawing a link there? The way you have framed your question, are you proposing an analogy between (a) talking about that potential link and (b) being more or less skeptical of Risk-Eraser, a priori, because Hauser is a white male?
Rahul:
In any case, the likelihood seems to also favor the hypothesis that Hauser’s new endeavor has a lot of B.S. in it. See my P.P.S. and various comments above.
I think Rahul’s question deserves a little more thought. Yes, it is Hauser’s individual behavior we are questioning and not some group characteristic such as race or gender. Still, it is not fair to paint someone’s entire career on something that happened in the past. I believe this is the real impetus for Andrew’s post in the first place. Had Hauser come cleaner to begin with, perhaps his reputation deserves to start mostly anew. But I don’t find accepting responsibility because he was doing too many things to be an acceptable explanation. At least not to the degree I would need in order to drop my fairly strict priors.
I think this is why reputations should matter. If we can simply pass it off on being too busy when we are caught, then it diminishes the meaning of reputation. When someone acknowledges their mistakes and really owns them, I do believe they deserve another chance. Otherwise, we really remove any meaningful sense of responsibility.
I agree that we need the concept of ‘scientific reputation’ to be meaningful, and that part of our responsibility to our profession is to be honest (and thus honesty is an integral part of our reputation). But I’m not sure that I agree that “it is not fair to paint someone’s entire career on something that happened in the past.” That is literally what reputation means!
But I think I see your gist, and I think it has to do with ‘reputation’ not being a 0/1 kind of thing. And that is good, because there are all kinds of different mistakes we can make, and those mistakes should have very different effects on our reputation.
Suppose a very busy researcher conducted a study, published a paper, released the data, and then someone came along and said “Hey, you made a coding error in a key variable, and when you correct that, your claims are wrong.” If this researcher came out and said “I take responsibility for that. I was too busy to carefully review every line of code my RA/statistician wrote, and thus this mistake falls on me, and thank you for helping correct the record.”
That is something that is gonna happen, and while we might update our priors on this researcher’s reputation a little bit (“sometimes a bit sloppy, but very honest, and as long as it doesn’t become a pattern…”), this shouldn’t be a career-defining mistake. In fact, I’d be fine if the person who caught the mistake coauthored with the original author on a replacement-paper to go into the journal that first published the mistaken paper… then the original author doesn’t “lose” a paper, and the new author gets one, and the record is right. That is progress.
But then if that same person came out and said “Yeah, you caught me. I made up that data to get tenure/funding/fame. My bad…” well, that should basically kill their reputation in academics, in a way that very very few would or should be able to come back from. Rightfully so. Because making mistakes and committing fraud are fundamentally different things. I’m of the understanding that Hauser is much closer to fraud than to being bad at proof-reading hundreds or thousands of lines of someone else’s coding. It is also why he hasn’t actually apologized, because it would be admitting he should be kicked out of the profession (see “right to not self-incriminate”…but interpreted in terms of costs/benefits of self-incrimination).
We are all gonna make mistakes. These should affect our reputation. But mistakes doing honest research, and the mistake of doing dishonest research, are two different things. I know for a fact that every single one of my colleagues has made mistakes in papers, whether they ever found them or not. No problem – that happens, and the good ones find their mistakes and try to correct them. But I don’t see any problem kicking out the frauds… I think we have to if we want to maintain any semblance of being a net positive benefit to society (though hey, if he is a great teacher…maybe let him teach undergrads. They learn plenty of dumb lies anyway and he would have little incentive to dream up new ones).
Good points about reputation. I think what we need is something like a decreasing reputation function that weights the past lesser as time elapses. e.g. A blunder 10 years ago ought to hurt your reputation far less than a month ago.
And traditionally human memories did just that (I think). We had a reasonable functional system with a good tradeoff between reputation memory & erasing your past with the passage of time. You did your time, rejoined society & had a good chance of evading your past.
Maybe what I’m saying is that we have ended up with too strong, too indelible a reputation function. A prior on reputation that’s so strong that it dominates everything else.
With blogs & the internet’s ability to remember forever reputational reset has become hugely more difficult.
Blog posts like Andrew’s will ensure that we never forget.
On the other hand, the internet (broadly speaking – I’m including blogs social media, etc.) has increased the noise as well. You can find almost anyone with a public persona will attract critics with claims tarnishing their reputation. Not only do missteps live forever, but it is hard to tell true missteps from false ones. Sometimes it is the reputation of the critic that should be damaged. This is not to excuse Hauser’s actions nor is it meant to accuse any of these commentators (including myself). It is just getting more difficult to assess the validity of reputation. I think this is part of why the signals (e.g., where your academic position is, where you got your degree, etc.) are so heavily emphasized. It is a poor substitute for determining the true value of someone’s research, but what are the alternatives?
In Hauser’s case, it seems he is about inflict actual harm on society through his Risk Eraser. As such, the argument for ratcheting the pressure up on him is even more compelling.
One can argue that at least his earlier fraudulent work had no practical implications. Linguists pride themselves on doing completely useless work that has no relevance for anything; as such, their mistakes are like the tree falling in the forest that nobody heard.
Greetings to the Stan team from Paris, where I am about to attend the three-day Stan course.
Marc Hauser hobnobbed with Stephen Kosslyn and Steven Pinker at Epstein-bankrolled EDGE foundation dinners.
I imagine the reason why Steven Pinker is supporting Risk-Eraser is because Marc Hauser holds damaging information on Steven Pinker regarding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that he could leak to the press if Pinker abandoned him.
Academia is one giant extortion racket, which is one of the big reasons that Epstein was so attracted to it.
The other reason of course is that Harvard professors like Pinker, Kosslyn, and Hauser think they are smarter than everyone else, and so I’m sure that as a result, Epstein took even more pleasure out of making complete suckers out of them.
Doc:
Nah, I think you’re overthinking this one. They’re just buddies. Risk Eraser also is endorsed by Harvard psychology professor Susan Carey. Do you think she has Epstein connections? More likely she just was friends with Hauser from his Harvard days and wants to do him a solid, or maybe she felt bad that Hauser had to leave Harvard. Also, I have no idea if Pinker, Kosslyn, and Hauser—or, for that matter, Carey—think they are smarter than everyone else. Teaching at Harvard is a fun job; I expect they recognized they were lucky to be in the position to do this.