[a_throwaway_6]

"Researcher" isn't synonymous with "academic", but it's not synonymous with "blogger" either.

Part of my point is that an actual researcher, i.e. a professional, would have followed due procedure, contacting the author of the book privately and asking for clarifications, and generally giving the other person an opportunity to examine and respond to criticism.

Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud.

As things are, it is clear to me the blog post above is meant to kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation" and the misleading statements about an "official response" from Berkeley etc. These are the actions of a scandal-monger, not a researcher.

[hntrader]

He worked as a research assistant for a professor for three years and is now engaged in amateur research which he shares on his blog, some of which has received positive feedback from some highly credible people.

Also, "researcher" doesn't imply "professional", since amateur researchers exist.

The self-appointed title of "Researcher" is appropriate, in my opinion. There are people in industry who receive that designation ("Real Estate Researcher") that are less deserving.

  "Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud."

But this is not an example of regular academic work that's being criticized.

This is a book that contains health advice being consumed and actioned upon right now by thousands or millions of laypeople. Guzey is therefore trying to warn regular people who might believe and follow bunk advice and suffer health consequences. He makes this intention clear.

James Randi's service to the public as a skeptic was proportional to the amount of noise he made when he would come across and debunk frauds like Uri Geller. (I'm not saying Walker is a fraud, but the public danger of bunk health wisdom is similar to that posed by conmen like Geller.)

I do still agree with you, however, that it would've been better to discuss the allegations with Walker in private before publishing them. Having read Walker's response now, though, I don't believe it would've made much of a difference. He's still misrepresenting official adequate sleep guidelines, willfully or otherwise, by saying that anyone who gets under 8 hours has "unmet sleep needs", contradicting the NSF.

  "kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation""

You're right - the accusation of "deliberate" is definitely a big mistake, and he should remove that since it assumes intent when that hasn't been established.

On the whole, though, aside from sparse mistakes like this (along with the mistake that you noticed of not making it clear that the Berkeley communication was unverified), I feel that the article is rather constrained.

Gelman also noticed this measured tone and explicitly complimented the author on it.

[a_throwaway_6]

I don't know if you've listened to any of Wagner's music? Most of it is long stretches of impossibly delicate melodies, almost lullaby-like, but these are occasionally interrupted by sudden spasms of noise, great blaring horns, thumping drums and men an women vocalising at the top end of the human volume range. I remember a caricature of Wagner drilling into a human ear with a hand-cranked drill.

What I mean to say by this is that when you hear Wagner's music, the impression is of powerful, loud music. Accordingly, when you read an artcile that spends most of its time in a low-key "measured" register but starts off with a big, splashy accusation of deliberate data manipulation, the impression is one of an article written to provoke.

Regarding "researcher", the author could have identified himself as an "ex graduate research assistant", but he identifies himself as a "resarcher", which sounds more important and experienced. This is the tactic of people who want to embiggen the impression of themselves and claim more expertise from themselves. Even if such embiggenment is not necessarily the purpose of calling oneself a "researcher" when one is not a professional researcher, anyone who really really wanted to avoid giving the impression that they are trying to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than what they are, would have shied away from calling themselves a "reseacher".

Finally, "researcher" on its own means absolutely nothing at all. "Biology researcher", "computer science researcher", "neuroscience researcher", "geology researcher" etc, give precise information. The author of the article calls himself an unqualified "researcher" and he is, indeed, unqualified to do so. That is a typical tactic of charlatans the world over and it should give you and everyone else who thinks the author has any expertise to discuss what he's discussing, pause. That goes for the economist blogger also, I don't think he has payed as much attention to the article and its author as I think you assume.

As I've argued at the start of this thread, it is important to understand who is writing the article we are reading. In Ideal Science World it doesn't make a difference who says something, only what they say. In the real world it's not that simple. Because academic integrity is valued extremely highly, accusing someone of academic fraud immediately places the accuser opposite the accused in moral standing. For an academic, his or her reputation (of being a good scientist) is everything. Therefore, when making such accusations, the character of the person making them is important to scrutinise carefully, because simply making an accusation of academic fraud can destroy an academic's career and an accuser may have no other goal than to destroy the accused person's reputation.

When the accusations come from a professional critic (another academic) with a good standing in academia, the chance that accusations of fraud are only made to destroy the other persons' career are harder to accept. But when it's some guy on the internet with a blog, that changes the maths very much indeed. Anyone can throw mud on the internet. Because it's the internet, you need to understand who it is who's speaking, before you look at what they are saying.