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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

#51

Post by marcus_holmes »

bitwize wrote: post #12
hnacct2001 wrote: post #4

Having 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…

You're basically replacing the label "procrastination" with the label "laziness" without understanding anything.

Are all people who postpone a task lazy?

What constitutes laziness? Can we define laziness?

Why are people lazy? Is laziness negative? Are there positive aspects to laziness? Why did we evolve laziness?

Are people consistently lazy, or are they only lazy in some areas of their lives?

Does scrubbing a toilet with a toothbrush actually reduce laziness? Are there other methods of reducing it?

What are the effects of reducing laziness? Are there emotional or physical penalties from reducing laziness?

Answering some of these would be useful. Just saying "everyone who procrastinates is lazy" is not.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#52

Post by onemoresoop »

fn-mote wrote: post #40
onemoresoop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Francesca Gino for data fabrication. She was also a best seller of sorts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino

For your amusement, from the post: > a week after Francesca Gino sued us for $25 million […]

That wasn’t successful but she also sued Harvard and won

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#53

Post by marcus_holmes »

bitwize wrote: post #35
bluefirebrand wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, no, he was not a pleasant person. Back in the day he was a management consultant, best known for an essay which rustled many programmer jimmies at the time: "Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers" (2005): https://web.archive.org/web/20190416200125/https://it.toolbo... Theory P advances the thesis that because programmers are lazy pseudointellectuals who chafe at discipline and use their arcane techni…

upvoted for an interesting and informative response. This is why I come to HN. Thanks :)

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#54

Post by paimapi »

Aurornis wrote: post #6

Dan 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…

> It revealed that Ariely had a longstanding relationship with Epstein, including having visited him at his New York home on several occasions.[45] One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him

I mean, I've always consigned 100% of NYT self help slop to the bin of books for people who aren't smart but desperately want to seem like they but this is just a little much now, Dan

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#55

Post by nightpool »

paytonjjones wrote: post #23
p-e-w wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exp…

I don't know the details here but I am a psychologist. The "electric shock" normally used in psych studies is tiny, it's like the equivalent of one of those little toy prank buzzers. You couldn't possibly hurt someone with it, this is really a non-issue. Related side note: Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effe…

ECT can be very, very unsafe. 70% of patients experience some form of memory loss and at least 30% of patients experience self-reported permanent memory loss. The rate of major adverse cardiac events found in a 2019 meta-analysis was 1 in 39 patients. For the people that it helps, I'm happy they've found relief, but it's a tool with significant costs and I know a fair amount of people who underwent it as children or otherwise were pressured to undergo it and I don't know any of them who have a positive impression of it.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#56

Post by hirvi74 »

Polizeiposaune wrote: post #32
freediddy wrote: post #27

No paper should ever be referenced until it has been replicated by an independent group. The replication crisis in science is real, and it won't take long for no one to believe anything anymore.

That rule would make it difficult to report on a failure to replicate a published paper.

Does some sort of batched style of research already exist? By batched, I mean a study where n number of teams all agree on a single methodology, and then conduct the same experiment simultaneously. Each team could then publish their results independently and the teams could publish one aggregate.

I know meta studies attempt to do this in a way, but they can sometimes have their own problems too.

I cannot recall coming across this style of research in much of what I have read as a hobby, but maybe it is more common in some domains than others? I am not smart, and there is nothing new under the Sun, so surely something like this exists, no?

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#57

Post by bluGill »

fn-mote wrote: post #47
paytonjjones wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a potential bad actor would change their behavior if they took, say, a 12 hour course instead? I am of course biased, but I have often been exasperated by the various "trainings", IRB processes, ethics classes, etc, that are required to run even basic psychology studies such as surveys. Meanwhile, down the hall, the medical department is opening the skulls of mice, implanting electrodes, giving them supe…

> Do you think a potential bad actor would change their behavior What is the appropriate way to help a righteous but underpaid lab assistant find the guts to call out a process as unethical and insist that the boss’s claim that the IRB has approved it is bogus?

The most important thing is they know how to report issues and have assurance that reports will not hurt them. If you can show other reports were acted on and the reporter not harmed that helps.

It also helps to always have more than one person who could call so they compete with each other to be first because they don't want to be the one seen as an accompanist to fraud.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#58

Post by trompetenaccoun »

Aurornis wrote: post #6

Dan 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…

We'd find problems with many if not most published studies if we scutinized them the same way. People like him get discovered because they step out of their academic bubble into the light of the world stage.

And mind you this is psychology, the entire discipline is only borderline scientific anyway. But even studies in the hard sciences are very often flawed if not outright fabricated. Adjusting data sets to fit the desired result (who'd ever know as long as you do it properly), changing the experiment and measure until they get what they they want, repeated measuring until the "right" data for the paper appeared randomly - those are all things I personally observed in the lab.

Not to even get started on the house of cards that is basing ones flawed assumptions on other flawed studies without even the slightest attempt at replicating their results first. It's standard practice to simply presume what's been published (especially by friendly authors) can be regarded as reliable.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#59

Post by dpc050505 »

p-e-w wrote: post #15
Aurornis wrote: post #6

Dan 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 exp…

Look up violet wands, you can shock humans with 0 training when it's a consensual hobby.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#60

Post by qsera »

lostlogin wrote: post #36
vjulian wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because “science” doesn’t know everything, and people don’t want to wait until their options are scientifically-validated. Yoga, breathing exercises, meditation and the like were once considered fads and derided by your ‘science’.

How do you decide whether something works or not?

You don't. It is too costly and thus risky. Instead you do a charade and convince authorities (who just want to cover their asses citing some vetted studies) and people that your stuff work.

It is "ass covering" all the way. Not "does it work" all the way...

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