On Beauty

From the academic fraud article in the Times this weekend:

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.

The relationship between aesthetics and ethics spectacularly uncoupled.

But then, this hits a bit closer to home:

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. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. “They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,’ ” Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles. 

Listening for the Sound

Auscultation: The action of listening, with ear or stethoscope, to the sound of the movement of heart, lungs, or other organs, in order to judge their condition of health or disease.

Monster

Carnival

Nice (if a little old) piece by Irina Sandomirskaja on the anti-Putin protests in Russia.

Farewell to the political winter

GO!