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Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

datacolada.org

101–110 of 274 posts

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Context matters. Otherwise we’re just being clowns.

I mean being a known fraudster, requesting money from Epstein, and asking about some girl he met through Epstein is context too which is not a good look.

He may be innocent, but he certainly has a large stain and stink about him.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#103
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ask yourself who benefits from equating "being mentioned in a file" and "having evidence this person is a pedophile"

The answer appears to be "people who spend more time on offense than defense".

Not to say that tilting things in their direction is a good idea, but that's a pretty wide class of beneficiaries.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#104

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…

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.

> draw the graphs she needs for her papers and then goes looking for the data she needs to support it

This is a vague statement and it's super important to be precise when blaming someone. I think what you meant is - sketch out the graphs with patterns that support the alternative hypothesis/interesting result and then look for data that make the 'real' patterns look like those in the sketch?

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#105
post #37
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?

Replication is unpaid QA on someone else's product. Nobody gets tenure for finding the bug, hence the field has been meaning to get around to it for 20 years.

On the other hand, this seems like a super interesting path for an (unglamorous) PhD -- replicate the N most important findings in a field, subject to some restrictions (maybe focus on the ones that are "easy", or haven't been replicated yet, or the ones that could be patched together to make an acceptable PhD thesis). This sort of stuff really appeals to me, I think I might end up doing something like that in 5-10 years.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This isn't responsive to the parent's question, in a way that ironically underscores the point: you can tell me that "1 in 50 patients experience X", but that's meaningless, unless I know what X is in the selected population at baseline.

I don't mean to pick on you. This problem is widespread in academic research.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#107
post #91
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She had sued Data Colada, I believe about that post. Seems like it got dismissed: https://www.science.org/content/article/honesty-researcher-s...

Oh wow. From your link > The fallout from the saga is likely to continue. Simonsohn and several of Gino’s co-authors last year launched a project to assess the reliability of her past papers. So far, this has led to a further retraction in February and a correction in July. Science reported in April that Gino also appeared to have plagiarized passages of text in some of her publications. It’s also hilarious how the j…

I think we've seen recently that it is a dark kind of funny. When your standards for catching fraud are as low as top academia, and expectations might be beyond the probable without it, it creates a conundrum when someone with a prejudice starts to pick targets to actually investigate.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#108
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…

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

Harvard, nice.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#109
post #21
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’.

> Yoga, breathing exercises, meditation and the like were once considered fads and derided by your ‘science’.

What do you mean "once"?

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#110

One thing I didn't know before reading this: an unusually large effect size can itself be a red flag. You don't have to understand all the statistics to at least notice when a result looks almost too good to be true.

It is interesting how all these famous non-replicating psych paper results feel reasonably intuitive to me. Like I can buy that having a more structured and detailed deadline helps you procrastinate less. I can even buy that doing a goofy little "power pose" exercise kind of hypes yourself up to give some self confidence and do better on an interview or whatever.

You would almost expect the opposite and that all the famous studies would be the ones that run counter to intuition. Maybe those get more replication attempts, or people feel less confident faking them.

The direction is intuitive, but the effect sizes are, as you say, unusually large. I'm no statistician, but if you have an effect size that's several multiples of the standard deviation, that would mean that it dominates the natural variation in results right? So you're kind of making an implicit claim that other factors in play (for eg in this proofreading task, how busy someone is or their reading level) are peanuts in comparison.

Further, if there are these relatively simple factors like how a deadline is expressed that make you several times better, you'd expect anybody who stumbles into several of them and stacks them together to be absolutely off the charts. Somebody who listens to Mozart, gets the right priming, doesn't deplete their ego, and receives short deadlines is suddenly like 50X more productive, which doesn't seem to match reality.

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