I had never heard of Wansink but it sounds like he's dominated the food science field, and has been the main purveyor of "common sense" concepts such as how serving food on a small plate will trick you into feeling fuller, and all of these findings are suddenly under attack [0]. Even worse, these attacks arise from blatantly obvious errors or anomalies that are apparent without even looking at the data -- which implies severe weaknesses in the peer review process. Given the scope and severity of the errors, it's really hard to imagine Wansink or the Food Lab surviving this.
I wonder if one of the main takeaways for other academics is to never blog? All of this only came about because Wansink seemed to sincerely want to give advice on how to succeed in academia. Though the blog post's tone of "just work really hard for free!" was already boiling into a scandal in itself, before people started actually reading what his hard working grad student actually produced.
I had never heard of Wansink but it sounds like he's dominated the food science field, and has been the main purveyor of "common sense" concepts such as how serving food on a small plate will trick you into feeling fuller, and all of these findings are suddenly under attack [0]. Even worse, these attacks arise from blatantly obvious errors or anomalies that are apparent without even looking at the data -- which implies severe weaknesses in the peer review process. Given the scope and severity of the errors, it's really hard to imagine Wansink or the Food Lab surviving this.
I wonder if one of the main takeaways for other academics is to never blog? All of this only came about because Wansink seemed to sincerely want to give advice on how to succeed in academia. Though the blog post's tone of "just work really hard for free!" was already boiling into a scandal in itself, before people started actually reading what his hard working grad student actually produced.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/84686385484...