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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

#221

Post by qotgalaxy »

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…

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Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#222

Post by dnautics »

qmmmur wrote: post #208
mike_hearn wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry your device owes nothing to academia? Are you referring to a computer? If that’s the case are you mad?

They said "nearly nothing". As a fraction of total effort I'd say that the contribution of academia is relatively low. If you're going to say something dumb like overweighting foundationality, I can counter by reminding you that all of modern statistics and thus academic science is literally downstream of industrial beermaking (and gambling) and not academia

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#223

Post by jsw97 »

There is such a smell around this whole literature.

I wonder what it's like to be a grad student in social psychology right now. When the norm is surprising results, any responsible, competent researcher is going to realize that they can't do it honestly. So this leaves behind people who are willing to bend the rules, or people who don't see the problem with, for example, the garden of forking paths.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#224

Post by andrewla »

edgyquant wrote: post #17
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?

Why do we even accept anything as true without replication by default?

Speak for yourself!

My default position for a long time has been that all results in the social sciences are garbage. If they go against intuition or my biases, then they are most likely garbage. If they confirm my intuition or my biases, then they are definitely garbage.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#225

Post by cucumber3732842 »

blackbear_ wrote: post #184
mike_hearn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science isn't self correcting. This is a harmful meme that we need to collectively put in the trash can, as it's constantly used by academics to evade accountability. The core problem is people conflating science with Science™. The scientific method is a set of techniques that help people discover and report true things. But there are two huge problems with it: 1. What exactly is the scientific method? It's not like…

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…

>This is unnecessarily cynical.

Are you living in the same reality as the rest of us?

Now, if he'd laid out the financial incentives of all of it and said "everyone is only in it for the money" I'd say that's a a little too cynical. But he stopped short of doing that.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#227

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #147
jarenmf wrote: post #133

Science is self-correcting, but sometimes, the correction mechanism it is very slow and inconsequential enough that people are incentivized to just publish anything. Peer review is merely a quality check—and not a very good one. Just the other day, I ran into a paper in my field that claims to have solved a central problem that scientists have been working on for 50 years, single-authored, using some fancy mathematic…

Science isn't self correcting. This is a harmful meme that we need to collectively put in the trash can, as it's constantly used by academics to evade accountability. The core problem is people conflating science with Science™. The scientific method is a set of techniques that help people discover and report true things. But there are two huge problems with it: 1. What exactly is the scientific method? It's not like…

Fully concur with you here. Ultimately it boils down to integrity and objectivity of the individuals involved, which IMO is in short supply.

Also my way of phrasing what you said: science = verb, Science™ = noun. George Orwell had a point about the play of words.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#228

Post by morning-coffee »

ModernMech wrote: post #201
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?

Fund it. Unfortunately there's hardly any money for regular studies, let alone replication studies. If you want better science there has to be tax dollars behind it. Otherwise corporations choose what gets funded, and they only fund narratives and experiments they think will be profitable for them.

> Otherwise corporations choose what gets funded, and they only fund narratives and experiments they think will be profitable for them.

Well, that's the incentive mechanism that keeps the accountability for the results whether we like it or not. The government doesn't immediately go out of business if the research they fund is full of fraud or goes nowhere useful. Moral outrage at all the fraud in research associated with these Universities and government funded studies isn't a powerful enough incentive mechanism to correct that fraud, apparently.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#229

Post by jerf »

aktenlage wrote: post #159
mike_hearn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science isn't self correcting. This is a harmful meme that we need to collectively put in the trash can, as it's constantly used by academics to evade accountability. The core problem is people conflating science with Science™. The scientific method is a set of techniques that help people discover and report true things. But there are two huge problems with it: 1. What exactly is the scientific method? It's not like…

My take on the self correction is, that later research usually cannot be build on wrong results. So over the decades or centuries the correct results prevail.

Later correct research can't build on previous wrong results. Later incorrect research most assuredly can build on previous wrong results essentially indefinitely.

I'm not constructing a full differential equation model for an HN comment, but I'm pretty sure any realistic model of likelihood of detection of the falseness of past research and other similar parameters would produce a surprisingly sharp cutoff when looked at over time, above which the science does tend to self-correct and below which it disintegrates into endlessly recursive garbage drowning out any real science being produced. And I'm pretty sure a number of fields are below that threshold right now. That doesn't mean the problem is permanent... the parameters can be changed over time, too, but the problem does get worse and harder to fix if allowed to accrue too much.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#230

Post by mike_hearn »

tomnicholas1 wrote: post #215
mike_hearn wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conspiratori…

Feel free to not engage, but for anyone reading the Nepal flash flood was caused by bedrock giving way, which isn't climate related.

https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2026/08/28/new-satellite-i...

The two links I give show the problem in action. In 2013 the IPCC was concerned because temperatures had gone sideways for a decade. Der Spiegel's first sentence is "Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted" and the next says they were trying to "hush it up". In 2015 climatologists announced a new temperature record that replaced the entire 21st century with different data, as reported by Nature.

That's an unambiguous sequence of events. You can't make statements about replicability in an environment where they routinely decide their already published data is wrong post-hoc, without retracting the papers built on that data.

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