A fraud, but not a villain. What about us?

Bruce Ramshaw, a surgeon from Daytona, FL, has spent a lot of his career exploring the ramifications of complexity science.  In this article in General Surgery News, he offers some observations worthy of attention.He starts with a story:In September 2010, a 44-year-old academic superstar was named dean of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences faculty at Tilburg University in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Just one year earlier, this acclaimed social psychology researcher, Diederik Stapel, received the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Stapel moved to Tilburg University in 2006 and started TiBER, the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research. By the pinnacle of his career, Stapel had authored and co-authored dozens of papers, some published in the most prominent journals, such as Science. The problem was that Diederik Stapel was a fraud. For more than a decade, Stapel made up data for his studies, regularly hoodwinking his co-authors, colleagues and students alike. Why would a recognized brilliant student and young researcher do this? He was clearly beyond capable of producing valuable scientific research. Why would he risk so much when he had the ability to do the work honestly?The New York Times gave the answer:In his early years of research—when he supposedly collected real experimental data—Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. H...
Source: Running a hospital - Category: Health Managers Source Type: blogs