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Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
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Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#12Having skimmed this article and the replication study itself (which references some studies that complicate our common understanding of the positive effects of deadlines) I’m left wondering what the constructive alternative is to deadlines and/or how deadlines should be maintained or determined.
There is no alternative to deadlines because time is money, and those downstream of you can ill afford to wait on your deliverables. Part of management's job is to determine how much time it should take so a reasonable timetable that stakeholders can agree to can be set, and then hold you accountable for delivering within that time frame.
I wish we could revive Tim Bryce's mind with AI, because I'd love to hear what he'd have to say in a podcast about this topic:
"Fraud in a procrastination study? You don't say! I don't understand why all this taxpayer money is going to study procrastination in the first place. Procrastination is a well-known phenomenon with a well-understood cause: laziness. Procrastinators didn't have a boot placed to their behinds growing up, so they reached adulthood slacking and coasting on their trust-fund money or couch-surfing at their friends' places, mooching off others. You see this a lot in modern software organizations, especially among the programmers. And now those programmers are all crying because they're about to get replaced by Claude Code. Boo hoo! The military knew how to deal with procrastinators, too: send them to scrub latrines with a toothbrush, and drum them out if they didn't shape up after that! We don't need millions of dollars in government grants going to academic research to study this phenomenon. It's as old as humanity itself—we called it the deadly sin of sloth. Friends, keep the faith!"
Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#13[dead]
Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#14Dan Ariely has a long history of controversies and studies with falsified data. He wrote 3 popular books and gained a lot of fame before others started uncovering the problems in his studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with hi…
[flagged]
Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#15Dan Ariely has a long history of controversies and studies with falsified data. He wrote 3 popular books and gained a lot of fame before others started uncovering the problems in his studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with hi…
> In 2006, when he was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, Ariely conducted experiments including administering electric shocks with a research assistant who had no human–subject training. […] Ariely confirmed this and said that he wasn't aware that the research assistant did not have the needed one-hour online human–subject training.
A one-hour online training is all that’s needed to be considered ready to conduct experiments involving things like electric shocks on human subjects?
Forget about this guy, the entire field needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#16Having skimmed this article and the replication study itself (which references some studies that complicate our common understanding of the positive effects of deadlines) I’m left wondering what the constructive alternative is to deadlines and/or how deadlines should be maintained or determined.
There is no alternative to deadlines because time is money, and those downstream of you can ill afford to wait on your deliverables. Part of management's job is to determine how much time it should take so a reasonable timetable that stakeholders can agree to can be set, and then hold you accountable for delivering within that time frame. I wish we could revive Tim Bryce's mind with AI, because I'd love to hear what…
> I wish we could revive Tim Bryce's mind with AI, because I'd love to hear what he'd have to say in a podcast about this topic:
If he's anything like how the rest of your post read, he sounds like a pretty awful person.
Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#17It does seem like its way too easy to do this kind of fraud. The study seems extremely easy to replicate (no fancy equipment needed, just ask some people to proofread), and yet nobody did until now. Is there some way to change incentives to get people to try and replicate? Assign undergrads to replicate random research papers?
Why do we even accept anything as true without replication by default?
Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#18It does seem like its way too easy to do this kind of fraud. The study seems extremely easy to replicate (no fancy equipment needed, just ask some people to proofread), and yet nobody did until now. Is there some way to change incentives to get people to try and replicate? Assign undergrads to replicate random research papers?
Why do we even accept anything as true without replication by default?
Why do people on this site love nutrition and self-medication fads?
People are surprisingly thoughtless.
Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#19Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
#20It does seem like its way too easy to do this kind of fraud. The study seems extremely easy to replicate (no fancy equipment needed, just ask some people to proofread), and yet nobody did until now. Is there some way to change incentives to get people to try and replicate? Assign undergrads to replicate random research papers?
> Is there some way to change incentives to get people to try and replicate? Sure. Pay them to do it.
If the culture shifted such that people were skeptical of original results but excited about replication, replication would be the big news and people would want to do it. How to get there, I don't know.