#wansink

[julianova44]

Good news! The guy whose research that helped is based on got thrown out of academia for falsifying results!! Shop while hungry all you like!!!!!

"don't go grocery shopping when hungry" doesn't work for me because Not Hungry Me cannot conceive of a universe in which food is needed so she buys like a cup of pomegranate seeds and some fancy cheese and thinks that'll get us through the week.

[jadagul]

This is still a Joseph Heath fanblog, but Enlightenment 2.0 has the inevitable flaws of an early-2010s book that draws on social science research that I have no odea how trustworthy any of it is.

Anyway I just reached the point where he's citing Brian Wansink experiments to make a point and I can't take it seriously even though the point is probably true.

[wolf-tail]

Brian Wansink when I CATCH YOU!!!!!

[nerianasims]

On reading those articles about the fraudulent food researcher Brian Wansink, this screamed out to me: "“For about the past 20 years,” he wrote, “my morning mediation [sic] begins with ‘Help me make millions of people healthier, happier, and closer to God.’" (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/brian-wansink-cornell-smarter-lunchrooms-flawed-data)

Closer to God.

From what I could find in a quick search, he seems to be a Methodist. His brother got a religious studies degree from Virginia Wesleyan, which while a secular school, is also historically linked to the Methodist Church. I cannot say for sure from this info, however. It's pretty clear that he's some form of Christian, though.

One of Wansink's popular studies (which I found from looking up "Brian Wansink religion") claims that WWII vets were more religious the more intense the combat they faced was, and that also more religious vets opposed war more. The religious propaganda here is clear, especially now that we know Wansink was a pious fraud.

That he was a pious fraud for the reason of wanting to get people to eat "healthier" (more vegetables and less food overall appears to be his definition of that), and that he linked this with religion, is not surprising. I keep running into cults of all kinds intertwining religion with disordered eating in the name of weight loss being somehow godly. Controlling food is an even better way to dominate people than controlling sex.

[accipitae]

Counterpoint: you should go back and re-read that really good story, paying careful attention to what makes it so good. Read slowly and pay attention to things like word choice, sentence structure, rhythm. How long are the sentences? How are they structured? What technical skills did the author use to make it so memerable?

Dissect that work and figure out what it is you liked so much about it. Then apply what you learned to your own writing.

There's a version of the "don't go grocery shopping while hungry" rule specifically for writers where you should never under any circumstances be allowed to touch your draft within 3 hours of reading a really good story. Because sometimes when you read something great your head goes "fuck this is so much better than my stuff I should make that more like THIS instead!" Look at me. That's the devil talking and you should close the document NOW.

[bluemoonrabbit]

Incredibly niche nerd brag: I just heard someone on a radio show share a snappy-sounding fact about nutrition, and immediately thought "that's gotta be a Brian Wansink original."

[downtroddendeity]

Footage of me every time Brian Wansink's 217 Fraudy Fraudy Papers starts getting notes again:

[rederiswrites]

So the P Diddy thing and the thing with pop-science darling Brian Wansink are both in my head at the same time. And obviously, they are wildly different stories, but in a way the question that should interest us all in both cases is the same.

There seems little question that Diddy is, and has long been, a monster in many, many ways. The details are naturally morbidly interesting, but ultimately most of them only matter to the people involved. Sometimes, people are monstrous. In itself, that's hardly a revelation. The real problem is that many, many people saw him, and either participated or looked the other way. Apparently it was an open secret (I mean I don't fucking know; I sure wasn't paying attention, but apparently there have been glimpses for decades now.)

Likewise, a significant number of scientists engaged directly with Wansink's shittily built studies and blatant data manipulation, and just...went with it?! Emails over the years make it pretty explicit that there was agreement among the researchers involved that they'd massage the data until something sufficiently click-baity came out. His studies were being criticized and retracted and yet people were standing by him. Presumably because he made headlines, he got people noticed, he got funding. Because flashy results are rewarded by the system. I'm no expert on the community in question, but those are my educated guesses.

So that's the similarity--both men held disproportionate power, in large part because of bad behavior, right where plenty of people could see them. But they got away with it. The system, far from stopping them, rewarded them. People wanted a piece of what they had, I guess. They wanted the reflected glow, or wanted to avoid the backlash, or whatever it was for any individual. They gamed the system, and the system was wide open to it. Enough so that neither of them is actually unique--just the current case studies.

So the interesting question that we actually can and should be involved with is not what the FUCK Diddy wanted with a thousand bottles of baby oil. The interesting question is "how do we rebuild these systems so that they are less vulnerable to bad actors, and how do we ensure that nobody is above the law?"

[downtroddendeity]

So, disclaimer, I am super super not an expert on any of the subjects involved here- I am a rando who can't remember how to calculate a standard deviation who fell down an internet rabbit hole in 2018 when the news was current. But I do love boggling at Brian Wansink, so in case any of this summary of the methodology issues helps:

The most important concept to understand re: Wansink is "p-hacking." When doing scientific research, one of the most common ways to check how good your results are is to calculate a "p-value," which is a statistical measure of how likely it would be that you could get the numbers you did if there was no difference between the control group and the experimental group. The exact details of how it's calculated aren't actually super important to the Wansink Saga, but basically, you'll get a better p value if there's a large, consistent difference between the numbers for the two groups. Most scientific fields consider results significantly significant if p is at or below 0.05- that is, if there was no meaningful difference between the two groups, the odds of getting these sorts of numbers are less than 1 in 20. The problem is that this means there's a dangerously strong incentive for researchers to do things like throw out a few extra outliers or only analyze a subset of their data if that will give them a p-value below 0.05, because very few people are interested in publishing research that doesn't find anything statistically significant, and if you can't get published all the work you did is essentially wasted and you're likely to lose funding and/or your job. Doing this intentionally is what's called "p-hacking." And it makes it a lot more likely that what you report will be a false positive, because, well... p=0.05 means you'd probably get a result like this just from random chance 1 time in 20, ergo, if you carve up a data set 20 different ways, there's a decent chance that at least one will meet the statistical significance threshold. This xkcd comic explains it pretty well using jelly beans:

As the comic's alt text jokes about, this is why it's important to try to replicate experimental results. Ideally, the jelly bean scientists would have done a follow-up to double-check whether the green jelly bean result holds up before everyone got excited about it, but that doesn't always happen, for a lot of reasons.

Back to Brian Wansink. What first put the hounds on his trail was a blog post he made in 2016 (archive.org link) where he talked about giving two grad students the data set from a study that produced no meaningful results, and how one of them said, "this did not get meaningful results" and had now left academia, and the other one compared every possible variable to every other possible variable until she found enough p<0.05 correlations that she was able to wring several publications out of a study that Wansink described in the post as "failed." A lot of people were extremely concerned that what he was presenting as a feel-good inspirational anecdote was pressuring his grad students into what one scientist described as "p-hacking on steroids." Cornell did a token investigation and said they found no wrongdoing, but he'd gotten the attention of a group of research integrity activists who started going through his publications on their own time, along with the journalist Stephanie M. Lee, who was writing for Buzzfeed News at the time.

The reason I think it would make a good class activity is that shockingly little of what they got him for required very much technical knowledge (the parts that did were mostly the researchers running statistical tests in reverse to see if the values he reported were actually possible to get). For example, one of the researchers involved, James Heathers, wrote a blog post about a data-checking tool he and a coauthor invented that used this data table from a Wansink paper (where he concluded that based on these numbers, one of the elementary school students had to be a Clydesdale in disguise):

However, even without doing that statistical analysis, anyone who can do arithmetic could theoretically spot what his coauthor Jordan Anaya did: since the study's methodology is that they weighed the food served to kids at lunch and later how much was left on the tray after the meal, "number eaten" + "number uneaten" should equal "number taken," but all of them add up to more than the reported total.

A couple similarly simple discrepancies Heathers pointed out in a different Wansink study in a different blog post:

Anyone who has any sense of how much 11g is and how much a potato chip weighs can recognize this as bafflingly untrue.

This control group got an extra person between paragraphs!

Wansink's messiest studies were mostly published in obscure journals, so they aren't all this obviously fraudulent, but just to test, I googled a list of his publications, pulled up a likely-looking one that wasn't retracted, scrolled until I found a juicy-looking data table, and voila:

0.9 positive comments and 0.7 negative comments per person in the control group + 1.9 positive comments and 0.8 negative comments per person in the experimental group = (0.9+0.7) * 56 + (1.9+0.8) * 84 = around 316.4 comments about the food from 140 people, or 2.26 comments per person overall. But oops. the text of the study says there were 481 comments about the food, an average of 3.4 per person!

But maybe the best proof is... the people who were actually onto him first? Weren't scientists. It was, I kid you not, The Joy of Cooking.

So! I am not an educator, but it has always struck me that this scandal could be an interesting way to showcase critical thinking, math, and reading as meaningful skills and put ideas about the scientific method in a more practical context that might help students understand why it matters. After all, it's way more interesting to check somebody's arithmetic when you're doing it to dunk on their massive empire of fraud.

Bonus links:

Stephanie M. Lee's big exposé (she also wrote a number of other articles following up on the story over the course of 2018)

The first scientific paper on Wansink's shenanigans

The Wansink Dossier, a list of issues found across Wansink publications that was compiled by Tim van der Zee (Archive.org link because the site got bought out and turned into a crypto ad)

Retraction Watch's list of retracted and corrected Wansink articles

The podcast Maintenance Phase's excellent episode on Wansink, which also discusses some of the broader difficulties around food science and nutrition research and has more good sources in the show notes

A few years ago, I got briefly obsessed with (and had a Tumblr post break containment about) the then-ongoing downfall of Cornell marketing professor Brian Wansink, an influential food psychology researcher who turned out to have been doing scientific fraud on a massive scale. This ranged from having grad students record every random thing they possibly could about a study and then slicing and dicing the data until they found a correlation between two random things that met a statistical significance threshold and only reporting that, to impossible data, to copy-pasting thousands of words between allegedly unrelated papers, to extremely basic arithmetic errors like sample sizes that don't add up. The scientists who exposed him dissected several dozen of his papers, but he's published over 200, and pretty much all of them seem to be like this. I've thought ever since that it would make a great school activity to bring in a stack of random Wansink papers and challenge the class to see how many problems they can find.

Oh, I've heard about this guy! I think they talked about him on an episode of Freakonomics, or else somewhere on NPR.

Academic dishonesty, especially regarding scientific publications, it's something very near and dear to my heart. And the fact that this guy produced so many in easy, delightful, daytime talk show style. Scientific headlines means that I think I know the angle I would want to take with this just because somebody says that something is science, doesn't mean it is. It's not a matter of you. Can't trust the mainstream media, it's a matter of people need scientific literacy in order to be trustworthy when reporting science.

But the reason why I'm responding to this ask instead of just making a lesson plan, Which I do intend to do, is that I never ever actually took any classes on scientific methodology. All I know about p-values I learned from Khan Academy and Wikipedia.

So do you think we could collaborate?

If I draft up a lesson, could you proofread it for me to make sure that it's got all the information that you would like to see students learn?

And if anyone else knows any way they can help, please leave a comment or DM me. I'll be grateful to gain a better matter of this topic.

[theriverbeyond]

I'd like to do a blanket unrecommend of any sciencey self-help book published between 2000 and 2015. The replication crisis pretty much demolished all of them. (Of course, some popular writers were just straight-up faking their data--Brian Wansink, I'm looking at you.)

ive been so critical of this kind of thing lately, currently taking a class where all we do is deep dives on statistical analysis/methadology and data validity of various studies etc and you would not BELIEVE how shoddy many of these studies actually are, even when their PEDRO score is quite high (not even to even mention how to a lay person anyone can make any obvious bullshit seem valid if it sounds good).

statistical analysis/methodology is generally quite boring IMO (my least favorite part of my program!!!) but I do think it is the kind of thing everyone should be exposed to.

[creepypastabookclub]

[https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cUt4l8DPq4GkhoaTJBPKl]

Donate to Palestine Children’s Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net/

Welcome to Mal 101 with Jonah, Wednesday and their guest Birdy!

Did you miss the official patreon launch livestream? You can catch the vod here!: https://t.ly/jqhtO

If you have a small horror or web fiction project you want in the spotlight, email us! Send your name, pronouns and project to creepypastabookclub@gmail.com.

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The Story: http://thesickland.blogspot.com/2013/03/last-day.html

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Featuring Hosts:

Jonah (he/they) (https://withswords.tumblr.com/)

Wednesday (they/them) (https://www.instagram.com/xx_wormsday_xx/)

Birdy (any)

Works Cited:

Recreation Watch: https://retractionwatch.com/

Museum of the Vanishing Dog, Episode 6: The Immortal Canine; https://open.spotify.com/episode/0buq8ilZlyl5iCN7Qu0qbz DFTD: https://nre.tas.gov.au/conservation/threatened-species-and-communities/lists-of-threatened-species/threatened-species-vertebrates/save-the-tasmanian-devil-program/about-dftd

Call of Cthulhu TTRPG: https://www.chaosium.com/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/

Brian Wansink: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/cornell-food-researchers-downfall-raises-larger-questions-for-science

Seven Sisters: https://medium.com/@myf.amra/the-seven-sisters-could-be-the-oldest-story-in-the-world-ed0ce8442c28

Ancient Viruses: https://www.the-scientist.com/ancient-viral-dna-plays-a-role-in-human-disease-and-development-70656

Further Reading:

Bear, Jonah, “EverymanHYBRID Unboxed: Unpacking the Psychology of EverymanHYBRID”;

Boyczuk, Robert, “Cure For Cancer”,https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Cure_for_Cancer

Chambers, W. Robert, “The King in Yellow”, 1895; https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm

Demidova, Aleksandra; Strugatsky, Boris; Strugatsky, Arkady; et al; “Stalker”, 1979; https://www.criterion.com/films/28150-stalker

George, Jean; “My Side of the Mountain”, 1959; https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41668

Lovecraft, H.P.; “The Colour Out of Space”, 1929; https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx

Mikaelsen, Ben; “Touching Spirit Bear,” 2001; https://www.benmikaelsen.com/touching-spirit-bear

Paulsen, Gary; “Hatchet”, 1986; https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50

Rettner, Rachel; “Tapeworm Spreads Deadly Cancer to Human”,https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tapeworm-spreads-deadly-cancer-to-human/

Strugatsky, Arkady; Strugatsky, Boris; “Roadside Picnic”, 1972; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331256.Roadside_Picnic

VanderMeer, Jeff; “Annihilation” & The Southern Reach, 2014; https://www.goodreads.com/series/112239-southern-reach

Wojcik, Jonathan; “Bogleech’s Coolest Parasite Eve Monsters”, 2011; https://bogleech.com/halloween/hall11-parasiteeve

Wojcik, Jonathan; “Bogleech’s The Flawless Bestiary of PARASITE EVE,” 2015; https://bogleech.com/halloween/hall15-parasiteeve

Questions? Comments? Email us at: creepypastabookclub@gmail.com

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

And because Tumblr doesn't allow more than 10 embedded links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/us/usc-president-speech-plagiarism.html

==

The idea that Claudine Gay was treated differently than other university presidents because of her skin color is not entirely untrue. Just not the way activists are trying to pretend.

If Claudine lived in "an anti-black world," she would have been ousted before Liz Magill. For that matter, she never would have been gently elevated the university presidency in spite of a weak - and as it turns out, fraudulent - academic history.

Have you noticed that the tactics and behaviors of activists mirror those of coercive controlling abusers?

Either Harvard's board hired someone for their top-most position without actually checking their academic credentials, or worse, did check, but hid it and proceeded anyway. Both roads lead to diversity hire.

[goodluckdetective]

You know what, to make my point that no one is immune to propaganda, I think we should share times we fell for straight bullshit. I’ll start.

Back in the 2000s, there was this idea that you could lose weight and eat healthier by eating off smaller bowls. I grew up in a dieting household and went “yeah that sounds about right.” It wasn’t until I was a full grown adult past college that I learned the man who authored that study, Brian Wasnick, had many of his studies retracted including the bowls one for just straight up fudging his data.

Sure, I was a geek when that happened but trust me, I’ve fallen for stupid bullshit since then: this is just the best example I could easily think of.

Anyway, reblog and join me if you want. Please cite your sources.

[clearly-ambiguous]

I think I should just start responding to requests from my (non-statistician) coworkers to "re-examine the data but this time try combining/only looking at THESE two specific categories" with a link to Brian Wansink's Wikipedia page

[inspired-lesson-plans]

Tournament of Plans

Week 05

Common Knowledge Check-up

Made-up Past Tense Irregular Verbs

Les Polygones de France

Dinotopia

πzzas (A&A, π day)

Assassination Museum (R&R, Ides of March)

Modern Union Busting (R&R)

Honorable Mentions below the cut.

My thoughts and predictions are in the comments.

Brian Wansink and P-Hacking by @downtroddendeity. I will definitely make a lesson about this, but right now I'm running down the queue.

Lachlan Grant's art blog and stated vs revealed preference I wish this got more attention, so please check it out.

[thelovebudllc]

A Discussion of Mindless Eating Chapters 3 and 4 • Simple Nourished Living

In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations on Food, Life, Weight and Mindset, Martha McKinnon and Peter Morrison delve into the themes of Mindless Eating, exploring insights from Brian Wansink’s book. They discuss the impact of environmental factors, cultural influences, and psychological aspects on eating habits. The conversation emphasizes the importance of understanding one’s relationship…