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Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

datacolada.org

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Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#211

Post by mannykannot »

onemoresoop wrote: post #52
fn-mote wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IANAL, but it seems the suit against Harvard is still in progress, as far as I can tell: Harvard is seeking a summary judgement, and on August 5 the judge granted Gino's request to file "a renewed Statement of Additional Material Facts that complies with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Court's Standing Order, including the requirements governing format and organization" [1] with 14 days to reply and 14 days thereafter for Harvard to respond in turn. It looks like Gino's team filed the former on August 26 [2].

From the Introduction, the gist of this statement seems (to me) to be that Harvard's finding of grave misconduct cannot simply be taken as being correct, and so the issue should be put to a jury.

Harvard has counter-sued, apparently alleging that Gino had altered and backdated an Excel file presented as evidence that Harvard's investigation had used the wrong data - a claim which which she, of course, denies.

A year ago, the judge denied Data Colada's request for Gino to reimburse their legal fees after the dismissal of the case against them, which strikes me as unfortunate.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67659904/gino-v-harvard...

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67659904/258/gino-v-pre...

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#212

Post by blackbear_ »

mike_hearn wrote: post #203
blackbear_ wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that is also how it works with scientific research: Once an article is published, anybody is free to read it, criticize it, reproduce it. That's because the government stays out of it: private individuals can use things like Google Scholar and Google Search to find other people's reviews and follow-up studies to better understand the quality and nuances of the original research. Consensus is an important part of…

Peer reviews don't appear in Google Scholar. The involvement of governments is when they force the public to pay for the studies via tax funded grants, without caring about the quality.

As we all know, oeer review is not a very reliable signal about the veridicity of the claims, it is merely an approximate quality gate indicating that a study was done following appropriate standards. There needs to be more awareness of this. Nonetheless, in some fields peer review have been public for a long time, and more and more journals are making peer reviews publicly visible. This is a good trend that we should all encourage.

I also think that it sounds like a good idea to hold scientists accountable for the quality of their research, but moving away from fraud (which should unquestionably be punished) towards merely "low quality" is a very slippery slope. Who determines when the quality is good enough and under which criteria? Citations and follow-up research already are an approximate signal, why is that not enough? Proving a study false does not automatically make it low quality. How much money and resources would these additional measures cost? Would the savings from fewer "bad quality studies" offset these costs? How many fewer "good quality studies" would be prevented by redirecting these resources.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#214

Post by spacephysics »

zug_zug wrote: post #196
bawolff wrote: post #9

It 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?

My proposal, once you complete your study, if you find a significant positive result you should be required (prior to publication) to describe your methodology in full, and have another lab (who you never have any contact with) blindly take your methodology, and repeat it (on video), and then do their own independent analysis of the data. It's okay if it's $200k or so to do each of these, the university should pay. T…

Would be a great way for up and coming researchers to learn and apply skills before attempting to work in labs pursuing novel research.

Maybe some joint effort across a large number of research schools which function as “proportional to number of students in your program, X number of validation studies must be performed” with maybe some monetary or access incentives aligned.

Since we’ve had student loans all but guaranteed, and therefore cost of schooling skyrocketing, the flywheel of pursing higher profits and more bureaucratic cruft (looking at ratios of university staff to students), its no wonder that incentive has extended to research.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#215

Post by tomnicholas1 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #191
tomnicholas1 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I weakly agree with this characterisation, it's not at all fair or accurate to put epidemiology and climatology in the same category as your other examples. Yes they have some weaknesses in replication practices (especially for purely computational work), yes the feedback loop for self-correction can be slow, but it would be a mistake to conclude or imply that the major results of those fields are therefore un…

Disagree, those two fields are extremely unreliable. It takes a lot of things happening simultaneously to be scientific. Yes, those two do make testable predictions, sort of. But that isn't enough. Modern (computational) epidemiology is rife with unscientific practices. They ignore data that shows a model was invalidated so the fact they make testable predictions isn't really useful. They also engage in a lot of circ…

> The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory

That is... not remotely true, nor supported by either of the links you shared. (Nor by any cursory look at the state of the world today, with well-anticipated Himalayan glacial floods as front-page news.) You therefore appear to be leaping over the line from healthy skepticism to irrational conspiratorial thinking, so I'm going to stop engaging, sorry.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#216

Post by edgyquant »

vjulian wrote: post #21
EA-3167 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people on this site love nutrition and self-medication fads? People are surprisingly thoughtless.

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’.

That’s different as I don’t think anyone needs science to feel the benefits of yoga or breathwork but lots of people want to enact policies based social studies that are not able to be reproduced.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#217

Post by paimapi »

gruez wrote: post #71
paimapi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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 It's possible to denounce someone, but still push back on false claims. Otherwise you're just condoning misinformation just because it aligns with your beliefs . eg. "Did you know Donald Trump literally eats bab…

sure, that's a great principle but is it applicable here? Ariely is noted having sent an email asking Epstein about 'that redhead' (along with hundreds of others and his work rehabbing the image of someone with a known pedophilia sex trafficking indictment)

if you assess the original claim against the facts, is it as ludicrously out-of-step as someone claiming that Trump found A Modest Proposal persuasive?

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#220

Post by qotgalaxy »

mike_hearn wrote: post #194
blackbear_ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unnecessarily cynical. > The core problem is people conflating science with Science™. You fell into the same trap by criticizing scientific institutions and the human spirit in an attempt to criticize the scientific method. > What exactly is the scientific method? What a ridiculous argument. What exactly is a hamburger? Just ask around and you will find that nobody agrees if a veggie burger should be consider…

You're right that we don't need a universal definition of hamburger. That's because the government stays out of it, so private individuals can use things like Google Maps reviews to police a common sense definition of hamburger along with quality and other nuance. If governments were forcing everyone to buy anything advertised as a hamburger no questions asked, then the definition of hamburger would matter a lot. The…

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