That's an understandable stance, I am aware of the Harvard/Gino controversy as well. But I think the reason why communities, organizations, and institutions are still effective and able to achieve work with undeniable intellectual or social impact (e.g., full self-driving in certain conditions or reducing the transmission rate of COVID during the pandemic) is because people still act in good faith and harbor good will because they believe that others are doing the same. I think this two-way trust ensures the rate of progress, which is why it is such a target for disinformation campaigns (i.e., all your values are lies or all your institutions hate you/want to abuse you etc.). So I think given a large group of academics/engineers and looking at the way people in groups behave, I am not inclined to believe that a large proportion of such academics/engineers are grifting, but it is easier to believe that perhaps there is deception in the upper echelons of such a community/organization that is imperceptible to collaborators lower in the hierarchy.
I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?
There's scant evidence to suggest that modern academics uphold more stringent standards than any other group of professionals.
If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you?
It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.
> If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you?
It would, but that's because I am assuming that physical, natural or societal constraints are likely to bound behavior and so deviation from ethical norms despite any number of agents acting purely on self-interest, regardless of their group. You can't grift someone to believe you created improved semiconductor node technology because of the physical constraints of the universe, or you can't grift someone to believe that gun ownership will inherently lead to violence because of decades of data that proves otherwise, or you can't grift someone to believe that X drug will cause X effect it doesn't because of natural constraints imposed by the body.
My point is that grifting has its limits, and reasonable self-interested agents understand they operate under the constraints of those limits regardless of their group membership. So the question I was trying to ask was what is that people are hoping to achieve in the long-term by associating with a particular grift after they've made a quick buck and the thing in exposed as a lie. So as someone said the nature of the grift has to keep changing. I guess I can reason about the behavior of people who hang on (like people who work in MetaGov) as possibly people who are dreamers or hopefuls, or maybe have sunk costs.
Your interpretation of 'grifting' seems rather narrow and may not align with its applicability to either the article or the broader understanding. Grifting extends beyond merely making quick profits or even publishing fabricated findings--though these are extreme and evident instances.
Even portraying oneself as an 'expert' in a domain despite having limited expertise can be considered a form of grifting: It is, in fact, the focus of the article's opening paragraph.
To draw a more specific connection to the present example, even if Metagov were to falter and fail entirely for whatever reason, these academics now have the opportunity to assert their involvement in a 'groundbreaking web3 governance model.' Consequently, they are likely to generate a substantial volume of academic papers stemming from this involvement, a key metric used to evaluate academics. There is certainly motive for academic grifters to be involved.
Particularly considering the historical context of web3, there are many valid reasons to suspect that certain individuals with grifting tendencies might be engaged in such a project.
I don't think "moral reassurance" has anything to do with it, at least in the hard sciences. The universe will smack you hard with reality if you're grifting, there are limits to lying in this space (at least). For example, you can't lie about creating full self-driving because it simply won't work in all the conditions/scenarios under which we expect human-like performance.
> a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies
> A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result
> A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others
How many of those papers were retracted, you think?
The vast majority of "failed replication" has nothing to do with fraud or false findings, and everything to do with "You have to write what you did to get this result that other people can follow, but you aren't really incentivized to be comprehensive and clear and note down every possible contributor so nobody can recreate the reaction you had in your paper because you didn't write down that you did it in an especially cold lab"
I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?