Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination • Hacker News Board

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#241

Post by SmirkingRevenge » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #167

stackghost wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real power move would be to start targeting prospective students. Universities will start caring of enrolment goes down.

They might not care even then. Journalism is an interesting case study. Their revenues went into sharp decline around the start of the century, dropping by more than 50% in some cases. Concurrently polls showed trust in journalism was plummeting, that people were tuning out because they felt that what they read wasn't reliable. Journalism didn't solve this problem by rebuilding trust and their audience. Instead they…

News reporting and journalism has always mostly been a for-profit enterprise. And no matter what business model one might choose (ads, subs, charity, etc) there will be perverse incentives working in conflict with pure truth seeking and newsworthiness. Audience capture, pleasing advertisers, the politics/interests of the owners, etc.

I'm sure non-profit sponsorship has it's own issues, but I don't think those issues are particularly new or unique or transformative.

The demand side is arguably the more intractable issue with journalism, since loads of people don't select for truth or importance in their news - or at least not very carefully. The institutions that seem to hold up the best are the ones with the broadest audiences.

On the issue of public trust in journalism, I don't think it's actually a function of the quality or trustworthiness of journalism. I think it has more to do with the rise of radical right-wing propaganda infotainment, a core pillar of which was (and is) delegitimizing mainstream media (and academic) institutions. The mistrust was created and cultivated. Consequently, there's not much they can do to regain trust, except to work harder at discrediting the radical right-wing propaganda that has been flooding all the zones for the past several decades.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#242

Post by amanaplanacanal » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #167

stackghost wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real power move would be to start targeting prospective students. Universities will start caring of enrolment goes down.

They might not care even then. Journalism is an interesting case study. Their revenues went into sharp decline around the start of the century, dropping by more than 50% in some cases. Concurrently polls showed trust in journalism was plummeting, that people were tuning out because they felt that what they read wasn't reliable. Journalism didn't solve this problem by rebuilding trust and their audience. Instead they…

You left out a pretty important force: political forces lying about the trustworthiness of journalism in a blatant effort to gain political power. Traditional journalism didn't have any ready defenses against that.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#243

Post by anthonyrstevens » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

dilawar wrote: post #141

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 is self-correcting, but sometimes As long as people mislead or make mistake unknowingly, it's fine to rely to self-correcting mechanism of science. The institutional rot is much deeper. It is not good to leave all this fraud to self-correcting mechanisms of science. We also have "trust" to worry about.

Maybe instead of throwing around ideas of "institutional rot" we can realize that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing "science" in the right way, are not out for material gain, do not engage in fraud, and are interested in truth and scientific advancement.

The fact that there are a vanishingly small # of cases where bad things happen in the process are the exceptions that prove the rule, IMHO. Certain segments of society like to hype these up (or even lie about their frequency) in order to discredit the scientific method.

"Institutional rot" is a meme that needs to go away. Identify the problems at the edges, fix them, and move on to letting the bulk of the work continue as it always has - quietly building upon previous valid results to the betterment of society.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#244

Post by chermi » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #240

chermi wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I present to you: Marxism and everything built on it.

Economics is a particularly slippery subject, since double blind experiments are practically impossible. No doubt some of the things Marx wrote correctly describe reality, even if some of the social experiments built on his work were massive failures.

I mean more the Marxist school of thought, not just the economics. Things like critical theory and post modernism.

But also, he made predictions of the near future in his time. They were incorrect. No updates were made. Those who did try to refine and update his ideas are far less influential. His original theory survives like gospel. I wish I could say only by non-academics.

Edit - back to economics. It's funny. I would say in economics the closest thing we have to double blind wrt economic systems is socialism/communism vs. capitalism. It's clearly not a true double blind. But also clearly some people just don't care to feed that data back in to their models. Because they aren't scientific.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#245

Post by amanaplanacanal » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #96

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is nothing scientific about psychology. There can be no science where everything is subjective.

Pain is entirely subjective, but we are pretty sure it exists, and there is a lot of science around pain management.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#246

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #151

MarceliusK wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be pretty wary of stretching wire fraud law to cover this. Prosecutors deciding whether scientific results are fraudulent sounds like it could create its own set of ugly incentives

Fraud law doesn't need to be stretched, academic fraud is covered and criminally prosecutable in the USA for decades. It has to be because they're using these results to apply for grants paid from tax monies. Occasionally someone is even prosecuted! Unfortunately, even when the government wins, the institutions just treat the resulting fines as a cost of business. See the Dana Farber Cancer Center: prosecuted by a th…

Thanks for this comment, and I totally agree.

Only important things I'd add

> and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it

That doesn't really surprise or bother me - I wouldn't exactly say it was a coverup just because they aren't heralding some major Fed case against them on their own website. But I do find it shitty that the Wikipedia page of Dr. Laurie Glimcher, who was president of the institute at the time, had some papers retracted and apparently resigned over the issue, makes it sound like she just retired because she completed her mission and has no mention of the scandal.

The bigger issue I see is that someone wasn't prosecuted, just the institution. I didn't spend a ton of time looking, but AFAICT no individual faced any serious consequences beyond "reputational damage". This is why the "corporations are people" shit is so aggravating. If corporations are people, then some people who committed these crimes should have faced legal consequences, not just have their malfeasance paid out by the organization.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#247

Post by subarctic » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

There's a bit of irony that probably 50% of us are procrastinating while reading this

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#248

Post by iLoveOncall » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

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…

And you protect them by not sharing their name.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#249

Post by neurotroph » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

jsw97 wrote: post #223

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.

In good universities replication crisis and the underlying structures are taught. (Un?)surprisingly, not much has changed though. Except for some unis, some journals, and a bubble of rigorous research continuing to work on meta-science and replications. Have to admire their stamina.

Source: did my PhD on exactly this topic

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#250

Post by neurotroph » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

LeChuck wrote: post #180

It's shocking to me how badly the data was falsified. You'd think a researcher who is A. well versed in statistics and B. has seen a lot of actual research data would be able to produce more believable data. Does this mean we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg? how many papers are based on hard to detect falsifications?

Why bother? Low effort data falsification is enough to land a high-ranking paper. Sure, really simulating data with some noise would be much more convincing but its just not necessary. Raw data is very rarely inspected during peer review, much less so after publication, and most reviewers do not address statistics — if they do, the usually refer to their pet model and/or use the same incorrect tools as most psychologists.