Totally unsurprising. Bet Stanford's not the only one with a president like that.
Something that became really clear during COVID is the sheer extent to which universities seem to lack basic research ethics. The ivermectin debate could be summed up as "once we exclude obviously fraudulent papers, what do we have left" which is why it was so rancorous. Disease prediction as a field is pure fraud: they cannot predict epidemics, never could, aren't on track to be able to, don't use the scientific method and yet routinely make predictions with absolute confidence whilst claiming to be scientists. Microbiology is flooded with papers that are quite obviously being manufactured by professional fraudsters, logical fallacies and false statements are easy to find across many fields, every other paper falls apart the moment you poke it yet nobody cares about any of this. Universities don't care, journals don't care, peers don't care, nobody within the academic system cares.
Why don't they care? Why don't universities actually fire professors who are found to have been writing BS papers? The only viable explanation is that the people at the top know full well that this behavior is at saturation levels and trying to clean it up would destroy their institutions. How could they know that? If they got to the top by doing it themselves, that would definitely be one explanation.
Academia is far from a democracy, but it's far from being a totalitarian hellscape, either. Nobody gets that far without the significant consent of those around him.
Yes, there are people who care. But they tend to get disgusted and leave, so I think it's fair to say that ~nobody in academia cares. We know they'll write open letters and organize outrage mobs at the drop of a hat if a conservative speaker is invited to campus, where is the similar behavior over scientific misconduct?
People care. A lot people care very deeply. The problem is that those whose care powerless and there is no incentive to fighting the system. If we try, we risk our careers.
I mean, yes at some level I totally agree, universities will not back you up if you complain about misconduct or poor work. Absolutely.
At the same time, we (outsiders) see academics set up massive political and pressure campaigns against the public, politicians and each other - that aren't directly sanctioned by the management - and this seems to happen all the time. Academics are some of the most powerful members of society. They are one of the few groups whose collective beliefs are actively dangerous to criticize in public. So the idea that they're all powerless victims in this regard is just so hard to take seriously. If the academy really wanted to, it could hold its own staff to account just like it does over the ideology of the day.
And the real concern is what other fields of research have this level of fraud or dishonesty? What other foundational research papers are yet to be outed as fake? We need to look at all fields of science where a decade or more have past since anyone has made meaningful progress on central problems, or have a pattern of non-replication. Those are strong signs that key papers are made-up and scientists are basically forced to build on unworkable conclusions.
That was most of them. But I recall at least one deceptive Lancet paper arguing against ivermectin which was also fraudulent. Lancet has a long long problem with controversial papers with the 'right' opinion which get far less scrutiny than required.
Why would you assume that? You'd have to read a scientific paper to reach that conclusion (or do the experiment yourself) and the trustworthiness of that is what is at issue!
But the most remarkable thing is the incredibly high quality of the journalism. Unbelievably thorough investigative reporting, outstanding exposition of highly technical items. From a college newspaper!
It's really good. The most interesting part for me is toward the end where the article adduces evidence that Tessier-Lavigne rather than simply retracting instead wrote later papers that swept the earlier conclusions under the rug. The investigators mastered not just the science but the bureaucracy of research, making it a great read at multiple levels.
> Schrag, the Alzheimer’s researcher without knowledge of the internal review, told The Daily that “to his credit, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne authored several of the later studies which revised the findings of his 2009 paper.”
Some smart kids over there in Palo Alto. I hope they keep at it when they graduate.
Why is it surprising that college newspaper did it ?
It is lot more likely to be able to get to spend countless hours required than a large commercial publication for an investigative piece ?
Student journalists get paid far less if anything at all and will definitely be motivated in a story about their college and put in the extra hours than a professional journalist also easily tap into subject matter expertise right there in their college
Journalism quality is a primarily function of how motivated the journalist (and the publisher) is about the story, there is no shortage of talent in university like Stanford.
I've heard from several friends at Stanford that the president is not well liked among the student body. That could be a secondary motivation for producing high quality journalism in an attempt to bring potential wrongdoings to light.
It’s not without precedent at other universities. Let us not forget UC Berkeley I believe that unlawfully arrested student protesters and sprayed them with pepper spray while they were sitting there in handcuffs
Iirc that was UC Davis (doesn't change anything except making sure the correct institution receives the black mark) and they tried to pay some org to remove that pic from the internet lmao.
It sets the precedent that journalism that takes place at the university should not challenge the entrenched power structure. Which I would assume to be the point.
I worked with the daily when I was a student (not doing reporting, but layout). Many of the people I worked with are pretty high profile journalists now.
To give some perspective, nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”. This is an ethics class and it specifically covers things like falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models etc. At my institution we actually had two whole lectures related to this, one was specifically about image manipulation and the other was about falsifying data.
Another very high profile article related to Alzheimer’s and plaque formation was also recently retracted…weird. I’ve become very skeptical these days, of my fellow scientists, which is both a good and a bad thing.
After a scandal in our institution with medical professors publishing in pay-for-play journals, we were required to take an ethics class. Our PI scheduled this for 10 am, and not knowing better I booked an hour of time and brought a notebook.
The presentation was two slides. The title slide was presented, and then a content slide was presented. Professor's lecture on ethics was, in its entirety, "You guys know enough not to be unethical. Don't be unethical." We pretended to be learning from the second slide while someone took a picture to present to administrators, and the ethics class was dismissed. I had 55 minutes of my hour left.
Unethically completing an ethics class was one of the most ironic experiences I've ever had.
What would your goal be in calling it out? Admin mandated ethics training, so it is either going to happen or it is going to "happen".
Professor is not getting grants to make research ethics slides, so he's not going to do it. The group needs a volunteer, but everyone else is already busy with assigned tasks. Would you volunteer to run the ethics training and do it properly?
> Would you volunteer to run the ethics training and do it properly?
Yea but I doubt they'd have me. I'm just a disruptive individual. With regards to the question of why I would make a scene in the lecture, it's because of the contradiction of agreeing to be ethical and at the same time walking out of the ethics lecture knowing it was meaningless. It's the complicity in society that leads us to being led by a bunch of fucking jellyfish.
> To give some perspective, nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”.
Unfortunately, I think that these sorts of classes mainly serve as either CYA or to check a box for a funder.
Most of the folks who do unethical stuff (in general) either think that what they are specifically doing is not unethical, or they just don’t care (“playing the game” is something I’ve heard quite a bit).
In certain fields, especially if you include anything that’s in a gray area of ethics, unethical behavior is more the norm than the exception.
> nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”
I think that is a broad generalization. I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student.
> falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models ... image manipulation.
My take is that this may be a "field"-dependent class. My PhD is in a non-experimental field (math); thus, we cannot have these sorts of issues (minus plagiarism).
FWIW, I did a PhD at University of Michigan, finishing in 2014. We did have to take this class -- I gather that the university put off implementing it for quite a while but eventually they gave in and did it. Nobody involved with it really seemed to want to be.
A lot of the class consisted of videos, the contents of which were mostly irrelevant to mathematics (dealing with things like falsification of data). The people assigned to teach it (it was someone different each week) would try to talk about what was in there, but there wasn't much to talk about because so little of it was relevant to math (mostly just plagiarism, as you say).
In an attempt to do something useful with the remaining time, most of the professors ended up turning it into something of a career-and-publishing Q&A, answering questions about various issues (though not really ethical issues) that can come up in writing and publishing papers. <shrug>
(I seem to recall one of the professors tried more seriously to actually stick to the material, but he was an exception...)
> I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student.
What often happens is that a given program is required to include an ethics portion or course, so the university has some mandatory class whose syllabus reads "this class will include an ethics portion".
Then there just never seems to be the time needed to get to that material.
At least, that's how my computer science degree went.
The problem, or a problem, is us. We overlook lies of certain forms, almost without thinking.
For example, look at the claims that the Genentech internal review was routine. I don't believe it at all; I read it as 'we believe this claim will stand because you can't prove otherwise'. That is not honesty at all, but a normalized protocol for lying. I'll bet you didn't think twice about the integrity of doing that.
But my key point is that, if that claim is disproven, what is the result? Do we say Genentech and the individuals making these claims are liars, and not to be trusted? Are they shamed and shunned, their reputations damaged? No, we've normalized accepting these lies; it will just be viewed as losing a game, as the normal result of the protocol - it was disproven so the claim falls. Honesty is not implicated.
We are lied to because we accept it, we normalize it, we don't even notice it.
Let's see how many of his current positions (Stanford president, boards of directors, advisory boards) he is going to keep.
It seems to me lying is a great strategy in today's society as you rarely face harsh consequences and you about never lose more than you have already gained thanks to it.
Unfortunately, a lot of universities and companies probably consider that his handling of this debacle makes him uniquely qualified to come work for them.
Still not the most controversial Stanford president... The first pres there, David Starr Jordan, has long been accused of covering up the murder of Jane Stanford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr_Jordan. Oh, he was a eugenicist too, but I guess that's less surprising?
(Covered at length in the book "Why Fish Don't Exist")
Remember Joi Ito at MIT Media Lab? You can deny and claim ignorance and shift responsibility but once multiple real witnesses start coming forward your position is untenable and you’re out. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20905905
Kudos to the Stanford Daily editorial team for following the story despite the official denials and probable warnings. Good journalism matters.
The denial quotes throughout the article are suspiciously narrow. In particular, they are always specific to the Nature paper, whick leaves plenty of opportunity for investigation and discussion of internal documents that preceded it.
Actually, it smacks of misdirection to me. He portrays the matter as one of a mistaken theory or hypothesis that was later invalidated (how science works), which deflects from the key allegation of experimental data being falsified or fabricated.
"I have never submitted a paper without firmly believing that the data were correct and accurately presented."
which is another way of saying... "it's not a lie if you believe it"
To give them the benefit of the doubt though, if they realized the data was wrong they should have requested a retraction. That they didn't after being requested to do so speaks a lot, to me at least.
> Each of the four senior Genentech scientists was contacted individually by The Daily and was unaware of the others’ accounts. Their independent accounts, given over several hours of interviews, were highly consistent with each other, and also consistent with publicly available information about the research.
It doesn't invalidate the entire story in any significant way, but after all these years, even after an hour or a day or two, wouldn't they all have been aware of each other's accounts and points of view? They may have explicitly reconciled them years ago - 'holy cow, what are we going to say?' Genentech may have coached them - in fact, I would almost expect it.
When I was young I really believed in meritocracy. I mean I knew there were royals who didn't have to work, but I thought by and large if you put in effort people will see it.
Then as I worked for a few years it became apparent this isn't close to being true. I ran into a huge number of people who reached the top by various forms of lying, whether it was little lies like taking credit for others' work or bigger lies like scam websites, or even bigger ones like crime. It's actually interesting how people will just tell you these things if you are even a bit friendly with them.
I went through a similar shift, and is softened a lot of my more libertarian views when younger. I realized that the circumstances of your birth have such a huge impact on your life that it's really like there's two entirely different games being played. Or another way to look at it is the more fortunate the circumstances of your birth, the more times you can fail before you succeed. I also realized how much institutional quality matters for the structure of society as a whole on a generational scale.
I agree but this brings up to me a broader question of what is a meritocracy. It is usually defined around wealth or social class. If someone lacking both cheats their way to the top through their own efforts and talent then to me that counts as a meritocracy.
When I was in charge of hiring I dealt with this every day. A huge swath of software engineers lie about their skills, involvement in projects, and just general accomplishments. These also tended to be the people who did best in our leetcode exercises.
>> These also tended to be the people who did best in our leetcode exercises.
Right, because the person for whom the goal is to get a great job / promotion, will leap through the hoops required. Another type of person might care more about what they are working on, or their professional goals or their values and less about playing the game.
I find it a bit curious that this reply focuses on software engineers, who are not at the top: "When I was in charge of hiring".
[EDIT:] Let me put my reply into some further perspective:
1) It's well known that job advertisements blatantly lie about the job description and requirements. The standard advice software engineers give to each other is to apply to jobs even though you don't meet all of the requirements, because the requirements often turn out to be optional, more of a unicorn wish list.
2) Ask yourself, which companies and which jobs specifically do lying software engineers apply to? Do those companies perhaps have a culture rewarding this behavior? And could honest software engineers be averse to applying there, instead seeking places or means of employment that are more amenable to their personal ethics?
I was a tech lead, I did first round interviews and had a larger amount of input, outside my manager, with respect to whom to hire. Hopefully that clarifies that bit.
1. I would say that our listing was accurate other than the fact that we actually worked in 4-5 major languages, not just the one advertised. That was never much of an issue though, we screened for a certain level of adaptability. To me there's a very big integrity difference between lying and applying for a role which you don't meet all the requirements. If you tell me, "I haven't worked on Kubernetes before, but I've worked on distributed systems and have messed with a lot of REST apis." I'd be understanding, no one can have all the right experience at once. Contrast that with someone having Kubernetes all over their resume only to find out they've pushed a button on an automated deploy pipeline and don't know the difference between a Deployment and a StatefulSet. The latter I consider a lie.
2. No, I know that company didn't have a culture of rewarding lies. In order to claim things for promotions you had to have multiple peers back up your claims.
What preempted the lies was probably discovering that we primarily did software development kit work, which most engineers have not done or don't have a ton of experience doing. Mix that in a bowl with the fact that we were easier to get hired at than Google and paid slightly above average (at times) it was fertile ground to attract candidates willing to espouse some aspirational stuff as if it were an accomplishment. This was especially relevant around Senior hiring when we'd ask about leading initiatives. A lot of SWEs have delivered software in a team, but few SWEs have led those initiatives, or only owned a very small part which they worked with (usually) one other engineer to deliver.
> I would say that our listing was accurate other than the fact that we actually worked in 4-5 major languages, not just the one advertised. That was never much of an issue though, we screened for a certain level of adaptability.
You could only screen who applied, and the job posting inaccurately described the language(s) used. How could that not have an effect on the applicant pool, and how the applicants approached the application?
> No, I know that company didn't have a culture of rewarding lies.
> You could only screen who applied, and the job posting inaccurately described the language(s) used. How could that not have an effect on the applicant pool, and how the applicants approached the application?
This is reaching imo. Most of the candidates never even got to a point where we were talking that deeply about the languages we worked on primarily. Second to that, candidates were allowed to pick whatever language they wanted for the interviews.
> Banking and financial services? Hmm...
This is a really odd take. We didn't do banking and we're heavily regulated. Additionally, it was a security product development team. Anyway, this line of conversation from you has been mostly unenjoyable and unhelpful.
> Anyway, this line of conversation from you has been mostly unenjoyable and unhelpful.
I would imagine, because you seem to be missing the point at every level.
The larger point is that when I talk about "the biggest liars and cheats rise to the top", I'm not referring to something like your software development team, which is nowhere near the top.
Another point is that people who are nowhere near the top are mostly just reacting to the perverse incentives created by a system designed by the biggest liars and cheats at the top, a system that naturally tends to reward people like them. The less powerful have little choice but to operate within that system and deal with it as it is, flawed as it may be.
A small point is that when you talk about "the candidates", these are already the self-selected result of an inaccurate job posting, and thus what you do after you start talking to them doesn't make up for the false impression that was given before you talked to them.
I'm not missing the point, I understood what you were saying and I flat out told you that the job listing was accurate. You just seemingly ignore that and go on babbling about your own idea of how our hiring process worked. It's like you live in a different dimension. Maybe take the portal back or something.
> I flat out told you that the job listing was accurate.
You flat out told me that the job listing was inaccurate:
> I would say that our listing was accurate other than the fact that we actually worked in 4-5 major languages, not just the one advertised.
"accurate other than" is a euphemism for inaccurate.
Anyway, you're still missing the point, which is that it's irrelevant whether your company's specific job posting is accurate, because job postings in general are inaccurate, with exaggerated requirements, causing job applicants to behave accordingly, which is to largely ignore the specific requirements listed in job postings and also exaggerate their own qualifications. And then companies scratch their heads densely and wonder why, somehow ignorant of the perverse incentives the industry has already created.
It didn't list every language we work in. Working in all of them wasn't even a requirement for the job, so no, it's not inaccurate. I personally would have put that on there, but it's not substantive to the outcome and as I stated earlier I usually found out people lied before we even talked about all the other languages that engineers could work in.
The rest of your post is just rambling. That's not why people lie, and there's a big difference between exaggeration and outright lying. You seem to have zero delineation in your head between this, which is frankly unsurprising given the interactions I've had with you here.
Me: "the biggest liars and cheats rise to the top"
You: "When I was in charge of hiring I dealt with this every day. A huge swath of software engineers lie about their skills, involvement in projects, and just general accomplishments."
Also you: "Contrast that with someone having Kubernetes all over their resume only to find out they've pushed a button on an automated deploy pipeline and don't know the difference between a Deployment and a StatefulSet. The latter I consider a lie."
You later: "there's a big difference between exaggeration and outright lying. You seem to have zero delineation in your head between this"
Yeah, someone who has Kubernetes all over their resume but has only clicked a button on an automated deploy pipeline that doesn't know the difference between a deployment and stateful set is a liar. This is what I referred to as "the latter"
The part of the quote you chopped off:
> If you tell me, "I haven't worked on Kubernetes before, but I've worked on distributed systems and have messed with a lot of REST apis." I'd be understanding, no one can have all the right experience at once.
If you have Kubernetes on your resume and this is what I find, that's an exaggeration. This is what would be "the former".
Anyway, I now realize reading through your comments why this conversation was a waste of my time. Have a nice day.
And the part of your own quote that you chopped off:
"To me there's a very big integrity difference between lying and applying for a role which you don't meet all the requirements."
That's not a difference between exaggeration and lying, it's a difference between honesty and lying. Where exactly is the exaggeration?
> I now realize reading through your comments that you're the kind of person that tries to vouch for flame bait and then complains about it. I've clearly wasted my time here.
I said: "I've vouched for this comment. Not sure why it was flagged. Regardless of whether you believe Tessier-Lavigne's denial, it's directly relevant to the story."
The link was not flame bait, it was simply the accused person's response to the accusation.
Now, in retrospect it does turn out to the case that the commenter has engaged in flamebait in other comments. I did not vouch for those other comments, nor was I even aware of them beforehand. I didn't look at the commenter's bio or other comments before I vouched for that one particular comment, which was simply a link, a very relevant link.
Thus, your criticism of me is totally unwarranted and ridiculous. You're grasping at straws here.
[EDIT:] I noticed that you've edited your comment to remove the part about vouching. Have a nice day to you too!
I think your reply is insinuating that kodah writes job adverts that egregiously lie, which is not replying in good faith. You could write about common bad industry practices without implying that kodah is participating in those practices. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> You could write about common bad industry practices without implying that kodah is participating in those practices.
I literally did that: "It's well known" "The standard advice software engineers give to each other". Is anonymous "kodah" well known? No. Do software engineers give each other standard advice about getting hired by kodah? No. Also, I talked about "companies" plural, not kodah's company singular.
The only one who insinuated about kodah, and about me, is you. You ought to read the guidelines yourself with respect to my comment and your own reply.
The intended implication of my previous comment was that the behavior of software engineers in our industry is driven largely by how companies are run, by their management practices, how their hiring works, how their promotions work, etc. The engineers themselves are not really in the driver's seat, they're in the passenger's seats, and the incentives for current and potential employees are often perverse.
> When I was in charge of hiring I dealt with this every day. A huge swath of software engineers lie about their skills, involvement in projects, and just general accomplishments. These also tended to be the people who did best in our leetcode exercises.
How did you filter for the lies/bs? Did you drill them to see if they actually knew the topics at hand?
In my interviews I got my portion of the interview over quickly, a basic test of programming skills. After that, let them talk and just start mapping the dots on their resume to what they say. If it sounds too far from what's on their resume then just ask. Interestingly, most people are happy to tell you the truth if you don't make them feel bad while calling it out.
From what I remember the recruiters would surf linked in and post on job sites. For context, that was a pretty average product company in the Fintech space.
Just my opinion, but if you work in software you likely have significantly diluted morals and ethics. We work in a highly extractionist industry. For that reason, I doubt that was the issue. After all, Google and Facebook still get lots of job seeker traffic.
Maybe your opinion, but I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion. Software is a critical part of people's daily lives and the successful functioning of modern society. Some, but certainly not all, software developers actually work on systems designed to improve some aspect of the human experience and not on systems designed to continuously extract money or attention from their users.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive imo. You can be helpful and extractive. A good example is implementing automation that replaces a job and not advocating for retraining for the people impacted or implementing procedures that encourage human oversight. Another is creating targeted tracking systems. Advertisements are generally viewed as a positive for the business world and a net negative for humanity. Working on the more inane parts of these systems doesn't make you less culpable.
It's really Goodhart's law, but operating on the bases of a system. Corruption acts to benefit, not to cost, so it tends to target upward. My sense is the more out of the ordinary you get, the less likely what you're seeing is reflecting normal merit process. That's usually interpreted to mean unusual levels of merit, but I think it also means what you're seeing is not genuine merit.
What tends to be lost in these stories is what you're not hearing. For every fake study, there's probably many more things going on with many more people.
There was some paper posted the last couple of days about estimating rates of corruption in financial firms. It would be interesting to apply similar methods to academics.
Mendacracy does have a funny feel because there's an "a" where my brain wants to see an "o" instead. Most of the Greek prefixes had an "o" e.g., aristos. Can anyone think of a counter-example?
> Most of the Greek prefixes had an "o" e.g., aristos
Most Greek prefixes don't have an o. Instead, the o is used to connect the consonant at the end of the prefix to the consonant at the beginning of the root.
Where the prefix ends in a vowel, that vowel is used directly. Compare anabasis, catabasis, analyze, paralyze, metamorphosis, polygon, etc etc etc.
None of this works here, because "mendax" is not a Greek word. (Which doesn't help "mendacracy" - the epenthetic vowel in Latin is i.) The Greek word for liar is ψεύστης pseustes; you probably want pseustocracy ("rule by liars") or perhaps pseudocracy ("rule by lies", but seems more likely to be interpreted as "false rule").
It's not clear where the rest of the root of "mendax" is supposed to have gone in "mendacracy"; if you really wanted to jam it onto the -crat ending, you should end up with "mendacicrat".
Whoever you are, thank you for teaching me two new words today. I've never seen or heard of neologism or mendacious. Today is shaping up to be a good day.
I did make it up, but Google Search indicates that I wasn't the first to come up with this combination. It seems pretty natural to substitute mendacious for meritorious.
This intentionally does not match some states that currently do not have R- representation, but by coincidence of letter combinations lets some others through. Fixing this is left as an exercise to the reader.
> Genentech, in a written statement to The Daily, confirmed that an internal review took place in 2011, a fact that was not previously public. The company characterized the review as “routine.” When asked whether this was accurate, the scientist whom The Daily confirmed belonged to the research review committee said, “no no no no no no.”
So wild reading that. Would be very funny if it wasn’t so deadly serious.
Places that care and investigate will in turn find corruption and you are likely to hear about it. Be concerned where you hear nothing as that sometimes means they don't care and are covering up.
There are also ethical people and companies you hear nothing about, but in a all but the smallest orginizations it takes extreme effort to not have at least some
Probably more so that Stanford's meteoric rise in prestige and social capital that it attracts a number of affluent, well-connected, ambitious types who are willing to set aside morality and used to getting their way. I highly, highly doubt Stanford educates the number of future scammers (Do Kwon, Holmes, etc) who matriculated there to conduct fraud, nor that they're representative of the institution at large.
I've vouched for this comment. Not sure why it was flagged. Regardless of whether you believe Tessier-Lavigne's denial, it's directly relevant to the story.
Something that became really clear during COVID is the sheer extent to which universities seem to lack basic research ethics. The ivermectin debate could be summed up as "once we exclude obviously fraudulent papers, what do we have left" which is why it was so rancorous. Disease prediction as a field is pure fraud: they cannot predict epidemics, never could, aren't on track to be able to, don't use the scientific method and yet routinely make predictions with absolute confidence whilst claiming to be scientists. Microbiology is flooded with papers that are quite obviously being manufactured by professional fraudsters, logical fallacies and false statements are easy to find across many fields, every other paper falls apart the moment you poke it yet nobody cares about any of this. Universities don't care, journals don't care, peers don't care, nobody within the academic system cares.
Why don't they care? Why don't universities actually fire professors who are found to have been writing BS papers? The only viable explanation is that the people at the top know full well that this behavior is at saturation levels and trying to clean it up would destroy their institutions. How could they know that? If they got to the top by doing it themselves, that would definitely be one explanation.