Tell People What They Want to Hear and Make Up Data. Winning Tactic
January 26, 2026
As one of the people who created Business Dateline in 1983, this article is no surprise. Business Dateline was unique in that we included corrections to the original full text articles in the database. Our interviews with special librarians (now an almost extinct species of information professional), dozens of our best customers, and individuals who were members of trade associations like the now defunct Information Industry Association encouraged us.
Forty years ago, we spent a substantial sum to modify our database workflow to monitor changes to full text documents, create updated records, and insert those records into the online services which provided access to our paying customers.
No one noticed. Users did not care.
Our research was not flawed. The sample we used did care, but these people were not our bread-and-butter users. If the information in the cited article with the very wordy title is on the money, nobody cares today. If it is online, the information is presumed to be accurate until it is not. Even then, no one cares.
The author of this cited article does care. The author invested considerable time in gathering data for his article. The author wants professionals in publishing and institutions to care.
We cared. We created Business Dateline because we knew errors, lies, and distorted information were endemic in online. Cheating is rewarded by the incentives in place. Those incentives are still in place, and it is more frustrating than it was 40 years ago to get a fix to a bonkers online content object.
One of the comments to the cited article struck a chord with me. The stated is from a person who identified himself / herself as Anonymous. I quote:
… Incentives [for accuracy] don’t work that way in business schools, where career success depends upon creating a clear “brand.” People do not care about science or good research, they care about being known for something specific…. Plus there are (bad) outside incentives that exist in business schools. As the word “brand” suggests, there are also very lucrative outside options to be gained from telling people something that they want to hear…
To sum up, accuracy doesn’t matter. If making up information advances a career to lands a paying project, go for the fake.
What are the downsides? For most people, what look like mistakes can be explained away or just get mowed down by the person driving the John Deer.
What happens if the information in a medical database or a nuclear power piping article is incorrect? Not much. A doctor can say, “We did our best.” When the pipe bursts, the engineers check the specs and say, “A structural anomaly.”
With fakery endemic in modern US academia and business, why worry?
Stephen E Arnold, January 26, 2026
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