Scientists Go Bad….Again
Time for another leap into the world of bad science, folks. I have two cases for you to consider.
I. Your Brain on Microplastics
I credit The Free Press for putting me onto this first one.
I suspect you all saw some mention last year of a research ‘finding’ saying that a careful investigation of the brains of human cadavers showed they contained an alarming amount of microplastic. That latter term is just the name for tiny particles of plastic that come off of plastic containers of all kinds, including those that contain potable liquids (e.g. Gatorade) and edible food. The original paper was titled ‘Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains’ and it is open access from the Nature Medicine website if you want to read it.
This finding was publicized in CNN and many other mainstream media outlets, including one of the authors saying that the concentration of microplastics they detected in some brains would imply said brain contained enough plastic to construct ‘a plastic spoon’.
Alarming, eh? Who wants to think about having the makings of a plastic spoon in their skull? The mainstream media, having long ago abandoned any pretence of being skeptical reporters, played this up big time.
However, some other scientists did display the skepticism that ought to be the hallmark of good science, and so took a closer look at this and other related studies, finding a major problem. I will just quote one of these skeptics from an article that was published in The Guardian just this month. [You can read the entire Guardian article yourself here.]
“The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.”
Oops. It is, by the way, notable that The Guardian was one of the many mainstream media outlets to make a big deal of the original findings purporting to find all those microplastics in our bodies. Kudos to them for following up, even though it shows they were rather too gullible at the outset.
Anyway, it turns out the methods used to detect the microplastics have a hard time distinguishing between microplastic and the stuff our brains are in fact made of. That does seem to me a problem.
None of this is to say that the accumulation of mountains of used plastic is not a problem. To my mind the biggest issue right now is that all the recycling of plastic we do is often meaningless, as much of that stuff we throw in our blue bins is not recycled, unless you count shipping it to third world countries to be buried as recycling. I quote from the original TFP article:
To put it another way, while they may not pose the health crisis some hyperventilating scientists and newspaper writers warned of, they are threatening us with an irreversible ecological crisis. “The thing is, we are not getting this stuff out,” said ecologist Matthias Rillig of the Free University of Berlin.
A final twist on this, also from the TFP piece. Another often-repeated trope about microplastics is that we take in enough each week to construct a standard plastic credit card. The TFP author notes that retired industry chemist Mark Jones had looked into this claim, and written about it here. That credit card-per-week claim comes from a 2020 study done at University of Newcastle in Australia, which seemed to conclude that we take in 5g of plastic per week, which is about the weight of a plastic credit card. The problem is that 5g is the largest of three estimates that study came up with, by a large margin. The smallest estimate was 0.3g/week, more than 16 times smaller, and Jones has doubts about even that number. Jones’ piece is long, but you might want to read it. I will just end this segment with the following quote from it, as it echoes much of what I read from other scientists worried about what is happening to science and reporting about it:
The 5 grams of plastic per week is troubling in several ways. It illustrates the power of meme-promoted science. A compelling, if misleading, graphic can cement fact into the public consciousness. It shows few people take time to ask whether a value they hear feels correct. It shows even nonsensical values can become accepted. It shows when facts are widely reported, they don’t get corrected, and that clicks and eyeballs are more important than truth.
II. Corporate Bullshit and Academic Fraud
Speaking of mistakes not being corrected, here’s another one for you. It is not as compelling, I expect, because it is not about our own health. However, it displays even more clearly the appalling behaviour of some scientists and the scientific establishment when faced with evidence that some highly regarded research is baloney.
That fact, to me, is the real problem.
So, class, raise your hand if you can tell us what is meant by ‘Corporate Sustainability’.
No one?
Well, neither can I, but I know there is and has been much written about it in the last 10 years, and I know that it is generally thought of as A Good Thing.
To help us all out, I went looking for a definition. Here’s what Wikipedia says:
Corporate sustainability is an approach aiming to create long-term stakeholder value through the implementation of a business strategy that focuses on the ethical, social, environmental, cultural, and economic dimensions of doing business.
Um…approach to what? I think to organizational decision-making. I think. Given that ‘stakeholder’ is a blanket term for every person and group who might be affected by such decisions, all of whom will have different views of those decisions, and given that any decision that does well along one of those ‘dimensions’ is likely to do less well along the others, I would say this definition is close to meaningless. That is, it does not tell us how to determine whether or not a corporation is using this approach. Just for example, if a corporation decides to raise the wage rates of its lowest-level employees, that will certainly be good for those employees, and they are, after all, stakeholders. However, this same move will also certainly be bad for the company’s shareholders, who are, once again, stakeholders. So, is paying front-line bottom of the pile staff better an example of corporate sustainability or not? I dunno. The definition above does not let me figure that out.
Of course, Wikipedia is generally useless for anything at all complex, so let’s look elsewhere.
The OECD has this on their website:
Corporate sustainability entails integrating environmental and social considerations into a company’s business strategy and operations. It fosters sound governance and decision-making and helps investors better understand a company’s long-term risks and opportunities.
Hmmm. No mention of stakeholders at all. It seems to be all about investors; i.e., shareholders.
But what about the worker? The two definitions seem quite different. That’s a problem.
Ok, one more try. I found many attempts to define this concept, none of them satisfactory, but my favourite was from the UN, always a good source of bafflegab. One page of its report entitled Guide to Corporate Sustainability, featured this at the top of a page:
WHAT IS CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY?
(The font was even bigger than that, and multi-colored. Very impressive.)
Here is the answer given below that question:
Corporate sustainability is imperative for business today – essential to long-term corporate success and for ensuring that markets deliver value across society. To be sustainable, companies must do five things: Foremost, they must operate responsibly in alignment with universal principles and take actions that support the society around them. Then, to push sustainability deep into the corporate DNA, companies must commit at the highest level, report annually on their efforts, and engage locally where they have a presence.
I know, there is no definition of the concept in all those words. Were you able to figure out the five things? Me neither. And, uh…..which universal principles are we talking about here? What actions count as ‘support the society around them’ do you suppose?
And yet….this overwhelming ambiguity is not the real point of this second part of my article. Yes, CS is boolsheet, as are so many 21st century buzzwords and trends. It is much easier to claim you are doing something good when there is no clear definition of what that good is. Corporations can do whatever they want, and by filling out some (also vaguely worded) forms, claim that they are being sustainable. Actually, it’s not solely a feature of modern corporations, my former employer has been claiming to be a leader in sustainability for some time now.
What I want to write about is more research malfeasance, but it is research on this bogus concept of Corporate Sustainability, and it is all about a paper published in the academic journal Management Science titled ‘The impact of corporate sustainability on organizational process and performance’, in 2014 (I know, ancient history, but stay tuned).
The paper has three authors, two from Harvard, and one from London Business School. And, I can tell you that Management Science is near the top of the prestige rankings for business journals, so this paper is A Very Big Deal.
However, it now appears to also be very wrong. But even that is not the heart of the story.
I picked up this story from Gelman’s Stats blog, so credit where it is due for publicizing this. You can read that whole post here, but I warn you to put on your big-boy-geek pants. It is long and complex. I will here summarize only the key – and in my view most appalling – aspects of this saga. The intrepid scientist who uncovered this malfeasance is one Andrew King, and he gives his own account of what happened here. You can read that, too, much of the Gelman blog comes from King’s original post.
First, there is a lot in the original MS paper by the three Important Professors. To my mind, one of the key things it claims is that corporations that engage in the undefined bullshit of ‘Corporate Sustainability’ get higher stock returns than those that don’t. The reason that is important is that corporations are, after all, really in the business of making money for their shareholders. But if you are an academic who is convinced that CS is an inherently good thing and so you want corporations to buy into it, your cause is greatly aided if you can convince the people who actually run corporations that doing so will increase the returns to their shareholders.
Well, here is what King has to say about that particular result in the Very Important Paper:
The authors did admit to the editor that they had misreported a key finding —labeling it as statistically significant when it was not. The authors claimed the error was a “typo”. They intended to type “not significant” but omitted the word “not.” They did not address the implications of this “typo”—that it misrepresented the evidence for a central claim of the paper, that corporate sustainability increases stock returns.
Now, if you believe that shit about a ‘typo’, we should talk about this great piece of land I have put up for sale in Venezuela. I could get you such a deal. The point, in any case, is that this key finding, that CS improves stock returns, is not actually supported by the paper’s own statistics.
That is hardly the end of this appalling story.
The authors of the paper ignored King’s emails about this and other issues in their paper repeatedly. He wrote to the journal editor himself about it, and was told nothing would be done, indeed the record would not be corrected. Frustrated that MS would not publish a commentary containing his analysis of the paper’s flaws, including the fact that if he replicated what the authors claimed to have done, he got very different results from them, King decided to publish that commentary in a different journal. He then says this:
While revising my replication for publication, I became convinced of a more serious issue: the method reported in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) was not the method actually used. Worse, the true method could not support their “findings”.
Uh-oh. Now we are talking about, well,…..fraud. No more ‘typo’ bullshit.
So, what does King do? He writes to the research integrity offices of the institutions at which these people work. Yea, Harvard and London Business School. King then writes:
Shortly after I submitted my complaint, the authors acknowledged they had misreported their method. But they did not ask Management Science to correct the text of their article.
And what did the Research Integrity offices do upon receiving King’s complaints? Harvard – nada, and LBS – a promise to address the author’s ‘poor practice’ with “education and training or another non-disciplinary approach.”
King wraps up as follows:
Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) remains only partly corrected in the pages of Management Science. Diligent readers may discover the erratum correcting the “NOT significant” finding, but they will not learn of the misreported method in the pages of Management Science. Thus, thousands of readers remain misled.
But there is yet another kick in the ass. King went to various colleagues for help in his quest to get this very wrong paper corrected, and got some of the following responses:
- “I can’t do anything—it would cause conflict.”
- “Your email is too long.”
- “I’m underwater for the next month.”
- “I’m too much of a coward.”
King notes –
The last came from an internationally respected scholar with a chaired position at a top university. I appreciated the candor. It revealed an uncomfortable truth: much of social science operates on a culture of go-along, get-along.
And, to amplify King’s assertion, I will close with this deeply troubling statement from some scholars who undertook and then published an in-depth investigation into what typically happens when someone tries to do what King was trying to do –
“Once a paper is published… it is more harmful to one’s career to point out the fraud than to be the one committing it” (Bloomfield et al., 2018).
Ain’t Science great?