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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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, memory loss surrounding the hours/days of the treatment is the major side effect.

Care to share the meta-analysis? How does 1/39 compare to the base rate of those with severe depression who did not receive ECT?

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Significant portions of the Epstein files are random noise. Though even for a popularish author it'd be strange to be in enough 1990-2018 news snippets to reach that many EF hits. In any case "is in the Epstein files" should in general be replaced with "is in the Epstein files, including this email to/from them I found"

The most interesting section from the large paragraph on Wikipedia: “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”

That still doesn't mean anything. Sure we know Epstein did evil, but not everything he did was evil. One should assume at least a few people he interacted with had no reason to suspect his evil actions.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#63
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then it "replication" becomes a target and thus would be gamed instead.

This is a constant tug of war..

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ariely is named 636 times in the Epstein files". Yikes.

Context matters. Otherwise we’re just being clowns.

> The messages revealed that his friendship with Epstein lasted for nine years, including well after Epstein was initially charged with soliciting sex from a minor.[52] Ariely also suggested that Epstein use learnings from his research to help rehabilitate his public image

what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker

anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#65
post #35

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…

> and that business has for centuries and will continue to operate as if what he believed were true

Then maybe we should do away with "business". Small operations do not tend to operate that way, and broadly everyone prefers their output (if not price) in the domains in which they operate – with a few notable exceptions. In theory, software should allow small operations to each serve millions of people, such that we (e.g.) only need a few thousand search engine providers to meet the needs of the entire world's population. Not everything has to be enterprise-scale, and indeed many things should not be.

If "business" means treating people badly, then we don't need it.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#66
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…

It is still seared into my mind when a PhD openly stated in a meeting once that she likes to draw the graphs she needs for her papers and then goes looking for the data she needs to support it. I’m sure I can imaging what kind of looking she did based on the fact that she was little more than a slick, fast talking, skin revealing, fast moving, usual suspect con man.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, memory loss surrounding the hours/days of the treatment is the major side effect. Care to share the meta-analysis? How does 1/39 compare to the base rate of those with severe depression who did not receive ECT?

The stats are from the Wikipedia page for ECT--I'm not sure about the base rate/risk ratio.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, memory loss surrounding the hours/days of the treatment is the major side effect. Care to share the meta-analysis? How does 1/39 compare to the base rate of those with severe depression who did not receive ECT?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30557212/

About 1 in 50 patients may experience a major cardiac event (or death) during the course of ECT

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#69
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 toile…

I am not lazy (for work. I am in my personal life) but when I procrastinate it's due to lack of clarity or due to issues acquiring focus. Both I have ways to address, so I completely agree with you

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#70
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 toile…

> Are there positive aspects to laziness?

Hard work often pays off in the future, but laziness always pays off now.

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