I did a short piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the LaCour-Green paper and its aftermath.

Excerpt:

The subfields of political science are self-correcting interpretive communities. Truth standards differ in different segments of this world, and many arguments that are (at best) speculative do get trotted out. But then they are examined. Most are found wanting and discarded. Some are rejected with prejudice, attracting esteem for those who find errors and shame for those who erred. We hope that that guilt will make scholars self-limit, but even sociopathic liars incapable of guilt (and I am not saying that describes LaCour) can be caught and found out in this system.

Why is this important? Because of “truthiness” — the term Stephen Colbert coined for claims that state conclusions or facts one feels or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts that are known to be true.

It is the nature of any article of finite length that some things are left unsaid.

But in this case I may have been too narrowly focused, on the one instance that I was writing about.  More generally, do I believe that there is some work that (a) is published with faked or at best stretched results and (b) is not found out, pretty much ever?  Yes, I do believe that.  So is “the system” working?