1) People definitely did get away with this, all the time. Historically, researchers had no obligation (at least that was practically enforced) to maintain and share their data and code. Peer review would check for specific methodological flaws and nothing deeper. If someone emailed you about your 1995 study in 2005, you'd say "I no longer have the code," or, more likely, simply never email them back.
2) In a highly competitive landscape where cheating is effective, the "winners" will be heavily selected for willingness to maximize the use of cheating. Even if only 1% of the population is willing to commit explicit fraud, that 1% is going to be heavily overrepresented in a world where explicit fraud gets you the top-tier publications that bring you to prominence.
3) Ariely and Gino both made millions of dollars from their fraud that they will not have to give back. It's worth emphasizing how poorly Ariely's fraud was executed -- he did the laziest possible fraud and easily converted it into money and prestige.
4) Related to the first point, it's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted since the '08-'12 time period. The replication crisis was just kicking into gear, and only among people who were paying attention to that type of thing. Ariely didn't come up reading Andrew Gelman's blog. There's simply far more light on any paper today than there would've been 10 years ago -- statistical and methodological understanding have come a long way as cohorts of academics came up in the shadow of the replication crisis. Having established credible groups like Data Colada to centralize these analyses has also been a big deal; tenured profs can't bully Data Colada by threatening their career progression the same way they could if accused via email by a random grad student.
My understanding is that the overall body of research suggests that artificial sweeteners don't cause additional calorie consumption. Given that is true (and leaving aside the much-studied question of other health risks from artificial sweeteners), it seems impossible that replacing some free sugars with NSS would not be beneficial for someone trying to increase calorie deficit and lose weight.
Think it's one of these things where the expected effect size is small and the measured output is multicausal, so observational studies simply won't be powerful enough to observe any real impact.
“NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health.” The classic public health advice: "Be More Virtuous." Correct, but not always maximally practical.
If anything, it reflects a greater degree of logical rigor:
1) It's commonly taken as a simple fact that overrepresentation of white people among e.g. the top hedge fund managers is evidence of society being structured in those people's favor
2) Jews are way more overrepresented among top hedge fund managers than non-Jewish whites
3) ...
Obviously the missing piece here is that (taken as a whole; obviously "Jews" comprises many different groups) Jewish people, on average, are culturally and genetically predisposed to success in intellectual fields. However, if you notice this but grow up in a climate where cultural and genetic reasons for group success are verboten, the nefarious explanations are the ones left.
There's no logical endpoint for "disparate group outcomes prove a problem that must be fixed" outside of discrimination against Asians and Jews. (It's an ineffective racist, white supremacist society that allows immigrant Asians and their descendants to outscore native whites on every metric of success used to prove the racism and white supremacy.)
Oh, transfermarkt is perfectly fine, and your general point about EPL money is definitely right -- just don't think it makes any sense to count pure transfer outlay without taking into account player sales.
You aren't "spending big" if you're spending 55m out of player trading revenue of 130m; you are (maybe) if you're spending 50m out of player trading revenue of 15m.
I'm not sure what metrics you're using for "spent around the same amount," but from preliminary looks at AC Milan vs. Brighton that doesn't seem true at all.
Breaking things down into transfer vs wages: over the past two seasons, Brighton have a net transfer profit of ~80m euros per Transfermarkt, while AC Milan have spent ~110m net, so 190m difference. (Stretching back further, you get to some seasons of 60m net spend by Brighton while they were trying to get promoted, but this is during a time when AC Milan's ownership spent 100m+ net a few seasons.)
Now -- Brighton are shrewdly run, but I doubt it's sustainable for any club to consistently show the kind of short-term player trading profit that Cucurella + whatever they get for Caicedo and Mac Allister represent. Given the owner's background, I would expect Brighton to continue to be solidly above-average, but other clubs have data analysts and scouts and such too (and are capable of just copying Brighton's strategy inasmuch as it's reverse-engineerable from outcomes).
1) People definitely did get away with this, all the time. Historically, researchers had no obligation (at least that was practically enforced) to maintain and share their data and code. Peer review would check for specific methodological flaws and nothing deeper. If someone emailed you about your 1995 study in 2005, you'd say "I no longer have the code," or, more likely, simply never email them back.
2) In a highly competitive landscape where cheating is effective, the "winners" will be heavily selected for willingness to maximize the use of cheating. Even if only 1% of the population is willing to commit explicit fraud, that 1% is going to be heavily overrepresented in a world where explicit fraud gets you the top-tier publications that bring you to prominence.
3) Ariely and Gino both made millions of dollars from their fraud that they will not have to give back. It's worth emphasizing how poorly Ariely's fraud was executed -- he did the laziest possible fraud and easily converted it into money and prestige.
4) Related to the first point, it's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted since the '08-'12 time period. The replication crisis was just kicking into gear, and only among people who were paying attention to that type of thing. Ariely didn't come up reading Andrew Gelman's blog. There's simply far more light on any paper today than there would've been 10 years ago -- statistical and methodological understanding have come a long way as cohorts of academics came up in the shadow of the replication crisis. Having established credible groups like Data Colada to centralize these analyses has also been a big deal; tenured profs can't bully Data Colada by threatening their career progression the same way they could if accused via email by a random grad student.