My reply:
1. I’m loath to give an answer about the changes in the culture of research because I have not studied this systematically. My impression is that, yes, there’s more skepticism and less acceptance of noisy N=38 papers in psychology, etc., and less toleration for unfalsifiable evolutionary psychology and that sort of thing. On the other hand, perhaps this has just shifted from the science establishment to social media. Ten or fifteen years ago, there was a pipeline (partly abetted by Jeffrey Epstein) from researchers at top universities to publication in top journals to books, NPR, Ted, Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc., and lucrative speaking and consulting gigs. So you get people like Marc Hauser or Albert-Laszlo Barabasi or Brian Wansink or Dan Ariely doing the basic research (such as it is), academic middlemen such as Steven Levitt and Cass Sunstein as promulgators, and the universities, journals, and prestige news media as part of this system (as for example here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/08/31/the-variation-ignoring-junk-science-thats-promoted-by-association-for-psychological-science-and-related-academic-celebrities-its-like-a-poker-player-thinking-okay-if-push-all/).
Nowadays, though, social media runs on its own steam, and the models for academic junk science are researchers such as Andrew Huberman and Dr. Oz, who cut out the middleman and promote junk science directly, sell supplements, etc. And social media is full of fake news and AI slop. They don’t really need NPR, Ted, Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc., anymore; they can do it on their own. So, in short, yes, I do have the impression that science has reformed from the bad old days of 2010-2015 (about which, see this article with Simine Vazire: https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/research/published/jmmss-3062-gelman.pdf), but maybe the public intellectuals don’t need academic science anymore; they can just make up whatever they want on their own.
2. My take on Columbia is similar to my take on many institutions, which is that they have an executive function but minimal legislative or judicial functions; I discussed this here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/01/19/lesson-charles-armstrong-plagiarism-scandal-separation-judicial-executive-functions/ and here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/11/from-the-three-branches-of-government-to-the-bidirectional-nature-of-legal-reasoning-in-a-way-that-is-similar-to-how-statistics-works-and-should-work-in-the-real-world/. As a result, their decisions are made on consequentialist rather than proceduralist gounds, and over and over again the administration takes the seemingly reasonable decision to cover up misdeeds.
Ford posted this discussion on his blog. It was kinda weird seeing myself discussed as a sociological object, but, fair enough, I’m a public figure, and people can say what they want as long as they don’t misrepresent my writings or claim that I said something I never said.
Ford’s assessment is accurate that I’m not very good at strategic behavior so often I don’t even try. It’s similar to how I’m a bad negotiator so usually I’ll just try to make my goals clear and not try to optimize, following the “Getting to Yes” principle that the main thing getting in the way of smooth negotiation is ignorance of other people’s goals. I think back to various successful and botched negotiations I’ve been involved with in the past, and almost always the problems come with struggles over details without there being clarity on the goals of the different parties.
Reform worked inside the academy, and the demand for junk science routed around it. The old pipeline needed universities as collateral: a lab, a journal, a trade book, NPR, the speaking fee. Raise the cost at the journal step and the trade moves to channels with no gatekeeper at all. Andrew Huberman (b. 1975) and Mehmet Oz (b. 1960) sell direct. That is a displacement argument, and it is testable in principle. You could count how many of the top-selling behavioral-science trade books of 2010 to 2015 rested on a named peer-reviewed finding, and compare with the top health and self-improvement podcasts of the past three years.
The weakness in his own story is the brand. Huberman trades on Stanford. Oz traded on Columbia. The middleman got cut, the imprimatur did not. If the university name still does the underwriting, then academic reform is doing less work than the reform narrative suggests, because the asset being rented is the affiliation and the affiliation survives the correction of the paper.
I asked whether the incentive structure changed. Gelman answered about the culture of reception and the fate of the promoters. Tenure, hiring, and grant review still pay for volume and novelty. Pre-registration is cheap to satisfy and easy to hollow out. So my dichotomy stands mostly unaddressed.
The Columbia answer is the richer one and the least developed. His model: institutions have an executive function and thin legislative and judicial functions, so decisions get made on consequences and covering up keeps looking like the reasonable local choice. That explains chronic self-misperception without needing anyone to be stupid or wicked. An institution with no internal adversarial process produces no findings of fact. It has no record of what it did that was not written by the people who did it. Its model of itself is assembled from its own communications office. Every step of the cover-up is defensible, and the aggregate is an organization that cannot see itself.
He skipped the statistical half of my question. There are answers available in his own idiom. Selection: the administration hears from the channels that select for agreement, and treats the resulting sample as the population. Measurement: the quantities that get measured are the ones the executive already controls, so the dashboard is a mirror. Forking paths applied to self-assessment: with enough readings of the same events, some reading always vindicates the decision that was already made.
He confirms my characterization of him on the record. He says he is bad at strategic behavior, does not try, and negotiates by stating his goals rather than optimizing. A subject ratifying a profile’s central claim in his own words is rare. His line about being discussed as a sociological object, and then granting the fairness of it, is the same trait operating in real time.
