Here is a link to the market. It is nice to see $1,058 of volume being traded on the first day; so far, the crowd is pricing a 40% chance that Enos will have a paper retracted in 2022. I am optimistic that the widespread adoption of such replication markets can encourage the replication of scientific research, and serve as a desperately needed check on the deeply corrupt/captured world of academic publishing.
Karlstack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This replication market is not just dunking for the sake of dunking. This is very serious stuff. The costs associated with irreproducible preclinical research alone have recently been estimated at US$28 billion a year in the United States. The more transparency — the better.
While some might say Ryan Enos’ research doesn’t matter (I have some sympathy for the “What’s the big deal? It’s just polisci! Who cares!” argument) it is important to debunk nonetheless because he attempts to paint white people as inherently racist, to indoctrinate the young generation and breed Democratic voters, and to justify anti-white discriminatory policies (e.g. affirmative action).
Ryan Enos is the Jussie Smullet of academia.
His pseudoscientific research is sponsored by taxpayer money and tuition fees, and Harvard has kept funding it for 4 years and counting with full knowledge of the research misconduct.
This seems like something Fox News might care about, right? So, a producer for Tucker Carlson asked Enos a simple question:
How did Enos respond to this inquiry from the media? He ignored it. It should now be clear to Fox News that they should start a serious investigation if they haven’t already. Instead of responding to the journalist, Enos clutched his pearls and tweeted a self-righteous 16-tweet-long thread about “norms in scholarly communication.” Replies to this thread were banned, of course.
Why are norms/decorum/professionalism relevant here? Who cares about politeness? Enos either committed fraud or he didn’t. Don’t change the topic and pretend to take a brave stance in defence of scientific norms.
This makes him look really guilty. What else can he do but retreat to the “norms” and “decorum” of his gentlemen’s club? He has no actual defence to the data irregularities. If he had one, he would’ve said it. He didn’t even attempt to address his glaring data issues. He tried for weeks to come up with some plausible defence for his fraudulent data, and this pathetic Twitter thread was the best he could come up with.
Look at this tweet below by another political scientist. She explicitly says she refuses to entertain the idea that Enos may have committed fraud — because it might paint the CRT crowd in a bad light. I suspect many political scientists feel the same. These people are activists, not scholars.
There is a reason she uses her dog as her Twitter avatar
The main takeaway from Enos’ 16-tweet-long thread is that anonymous critiques shouldn’t matter, or even be addressed at all. “DO NOT PAY ATTENTION TO ANONYMOUS CRITIQUES,” preaches the man whose career is at stake over an anonymous critique showing he fabricated data. Yup… anonymous critiques are best swept under the rug.
Enos addressed anonymous allegations regarding his PNAS fraud last week. Now, he is refusing to comment on anonymous allegations regarding his AJPS fraud. This is logically inconsistent and signals that he is willing to respond to anonymous critiques when he thinks he has a clever/plausible excuse, but when faced with smoking gun data, he conveniently grows a set of “principles.” Don’t be fooled — this man has no principles — he just says whatever is convenient in the moment, much like a weasel would.
Second: peer review is already anonymous.
Third: Andrew Gelman isn’t anonymous.
Fourth: Enos argues that if you have a problem with his data, you should man up and put your name to it. Easy for him to say that, as a tenured CIS white male at Harvard. What URM grad student or AP will put their own name on a paper accusing a Harvard prof of fabricating and falsifying his data? That would be career suicide.
Fifth: allegations of misconduct can be brought anonymously. They just can. There is no rule that says they can’t. The author still has the obligation to address them, rather than ignore them.
Sixth: Harvard had the smoking gun document for nearly four years. There was an investigation at Harvard. It was swept under the rug by some officials. Harvard is not anonymous.
The corrupt administrator in this case has a face and name. That name is Claudine Gay. She is the one defending Enos. Gay is an affirmative action hire and DEI activist who is currently Dean of the Faculty Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard. She gets to decide who Harvard hires. She is noteworthy in this story because the Committee on Professional Conduct who investigated Enos in 2018 needed her approval to do anything.
If you take a look under the hood of her research, basically every single one of her most important papers has similar problems to Enos:
“We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine G**, 2002).“
— the footnotes of a 2002 conference paper titled 'Logical Inconsistency in King-based Ecological Regressions.'
If you dig even a little bit, you will find corpses upon corpses buried in her Google Scholar profile. Word on the street is that her papers can’t be replicated. She has never addressed the criticisms regarding the inconsistencies in her work, and she straight up refuses to share any code or data.
It makes sense that theories like "racial resentment", "racial threat", "critical race theory" and similar supposedly "scientific" theories are only defended today by scholars whose work is either severely flawed or doesn't replicate. If Gay is to find Enos guilty of fabricating data, this will draw attention to her own bullshit papers, and her own fraud might come to light. She works in the same field as Enos, and he prominently cites her in his work often. Imagine her making a public statement going over the details of how Enos fabricated data to show that white people felt threatened by minorities? It would be like publicly exposing her own fraud, the fraud of the whole field.
Hilariously, in his latest tweetstorm, Enos threw Gay under the bus because he says she never brought the allegations to his attention (which she was obligated to do, anonymous or not). So she must have dismissed the report without a good reason. Ask yourselves under what conditions the report would have been dismissed by Gay and the Harvard spokesperson would keep saying "no comment."
Jesse Singal Botched His Goffman Investigation
As I argued in my last article, Jesse Singal botched his Enos investigation by 1) getting scooped by me 2) being innumerate and lacking any coding/data skills 3) (purposely?) ignoring the biggest smoking gun 4) being biased 5) being lazy 6) going on vacation and not following up with anything.
This isn’t the first Singal has tried to whitewash data fraud. Six years ago, he whiteknighted for renowned fraudster Alice Goffman. His defence of Goffman has aged like milk, as it is safe to say that everyone now unanimously agrees Goffman is super guilty. So guilty, in fact, that Alice Goffman’s name is synonymous with academic fraud — her name has been turned into a verb — you could say“he Goffman’d it!” to any economics, sociology, or political science professor and they would instantly know who you are talking about.
Alice Goffman is a sociologist who wrote a book where significant portions are embellished, faked, fabricated, or otherwise pulled from thin air. Here are just some of the details she embellished:
In the book, Goffman witnessed a murder and got blood-spattered. This warranted one throwaway sentence in the entire book and was never confirmed by the police. How is it that having someone murdered right in front of her, and the blood splashing all over her, merits no more than one throwaway sentence?
She claims she drove the getaway car in a murder revenge plot.
She “interviews” subjects who gush about President Obama…. years before Obama even ran for President.
She “interviews” people in her neighbourhood who have been proven to be in prison at the time they were supposedly interviewed.
She claims to have seen poor people in Detroit charring a rat over an open flame for food.
She conducted a survey, in the ghetto, full of very sensitive questions, and received a 100% response rate. No survey has a 100% response rate. Remember, one of the early red flags regarding the LaCour scandal was that his response rate was unusually high. This is a hallmark of fabricated survey data.
She made up a fake story about a hospital that was denied by police, public defenders and hospital workers. Even Jesse Singal couldn't corroborate it.
She never even lived in the neighbourhood she embedded herself in, as she falsely claimed.
She lied by inflating the number of funerals for murder victims she attended, and when exposed, she defended it by saying "oops, it was a typo." She claimed several typos when confronted on several other points.
She claims she was interrogated in a police station interview room with a gun on the table. As a matter of basic security, all personnel are prohibited from bringing weapons into interrogation rooms, let alone placing guns on a table where they could be seized by a suspect. Any cop who breaks that rule is subject to suspension without pay. (This has been independently confirmed by Philadelphia police officers.)
She burned all her notes.
Dozens of other such fabrications and lies exist in her book. She made tons of stuff up. End of story.
Jesse Singal, however, thought his fellow Princeton grad, Goffman, was worth defending in this article:
"Alice Goffman conducted some amazing ethnographic research, and her book is almost entirely true, not to mention quite important … the most likely explanation for these discrepancies is that … details about how these events unfolded got lost along the way," he gushes, before declaring that her critics are conspiracy theorists on the internet who are annoying obsessive nobodies who need to move on. MOVE ALONG. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
No, Jesse, details about Alice Goffman’s research did not get lost along the way, her book didn’t have dozens of happy accidents. Her book was deliberately fraudulent, and you are giving her cover, just like you are giving Enos cover.
Singal pretends as if the central question of her fraud is whether or not she knew any black people. So Singal demonstrates that she knows some black people, which wasn't even a serious question, and then pats him on his back and declares mission accomplished. This is similar to how Singal ignored the smoking gun data in his Enos article and focused on periphery stuff. He always ignores the biggest question.
Goffman’s lawyer can now simply point to Singal’s article that tells us what we already knew and say "Goffman’s book was verified by a journalist, we will have no additional comments. If Jesse Singal approves, who could object?” That is exactly what Enos’ lawyers can do now, too.
Why would Singal write this article? Hard to say. I think the simple explanation is that it is his schtick. As a commenter on my last article pointed out, Singal’s entire shtick “is to be the reasonable man who wades bravely into the controversy du jour with the mantle of "I'm not mad at anyone and just want to understand." He isn’t a journalist who cares about truth or justice, he is just running a schtick. Some people might call that grifting.
There are more similarities and differences between the Goffman and Enos scandals:
Their work resonates with the progressive/communist/Marxist/CRT crowd; white liberals (especially in academia) love this kind of (fictionalized, fraudulent) work because they are voyeurs who get a sordid pleasure out of pretending to help suffering people of colour.
Goffman was initially exposed by an anonymous open letter. Enos was initially exposed by an anonymous open letter.
Alice Goffman embargoed her dissertation. Enos embargoed his dissertation.
Their strategy is to stonewall. Goffman and Enos both refuse to address the main criticisms of their work. People keep bringing up the same points because they never actually respond to them.
Goffman’s work is qualitative, and Enos’ work is quantitative. Meaning while she burned her notes, we can all see Enos’ data. He has less plausible deniability than her. He is caught red handed. We can all see the data.
Wrapping Up
If you have made it this far in this article, odds are you care deeply about academic fraud and research misconduct. You probably don’t want to see Enos get away with his crimes. Sadly, he still might, despite not being able to come up with a credible explanation for so many irregularities in so many datasets.
The only way to hold him accountable is to keep pressure on a few key stakeholders. While PNAS is investigating, AJPS refuses to investigate. Please email the AJPS leadership team and ask them why they are not investigating his fabricated data. I promise you, they won’t be able to give you a good answer.
jll9jx@virginia.edu (lead editor)
kdolan@uwm.edu (lead editor)
ajps@ajps.org (managing editor)
PEC@mpsanet.org (ethics committee)
Also please email RetractionWatch, Harvard, and whoever else you might know — especially in media. What this story really needs is to get mainstream media attention, otherwise, Harvard will sweep it under the rug. So if anyone reading this happens to know someone at like, Scientific American, or Wall Street Journal, or someplace similar, please ask them to do a story on Enos’ fabricated data. Barring that, please share this article. The more visibility it gets on social media, the more likely it is that Harvard president Larry Bacow will be forced to act.
Great research! People with the permissable viewpoint get away with fraud, because to do otherwise would knock down the whole anti-white racism house of cards. My theory still holds... All this bullshit is due to weak people with mental disorders.
Great research! People with the permissable viewpoint get away with fraud, because to do otherwise would knock down the whole anti-white racism house of cards. My theory still holds... All this bullshit is due to weak people with mental disorders.
Research that can't be verified by looking at the original data should be viewed as the opposite of research or junk science