Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

datacolada.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 271 posts

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#181

Post by Metacelsus »

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…

>really top journals like Scientific Reports

I wouldn't consider Scientific Reports to be a top journal, it's basically pay-to-publish

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#182

Post by lazide »

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.

Only if people fight for that to happen, or there is some external factor forcing it to be so (like a war or other existential threat).

Otherwise people will happily go along with BS.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#183

Post by lazide »

enaaem wrote: post #177
mike_hearn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think so. I used to believe this too. Surely you try and build on a result which creates an implicit replication study, then your experiments don't work and the problem is discovered pretty quick. Hence, self correction. It often doesn't happen. The reasons seem to vary by field. We do see it in a few very hard fields like materials science. In the softer end of social sciences like anthropology, education or t…

The situation of [2] is crazy. Because both the author of [2] and the people using Ferguson’s model are wrong. And the author's advice in one of the last paragraphs of we just need better programmers is also wrong. The issue is that pandemics are extremely fat-tailed in terms of fatalities [3]. You need to collect a shit tons of data to estimate any reliable parameters and no one has time for that. The only thing you…

Western countries won’t let an expert make the call, because there hasn’t been recent enough pain and suffering to put it in recent memory the necessity for it.

After all, why suffer if it isn’t actually necessary?

Asia had recent experience with the first SARS, which had very real and extremely high fatality rates, so for them it was a relatively easy (not an easy) call.

For the west, when was the last time we had a real pandemic that actually killed a lot of people? Almost a century ago.

Somewhat ironically because the west listened to experts for a very long time.

Notably, the last time it had a major issue also coincided with a world war.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#184

Post by blackbear_ »

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…

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 considered a hamburger, or if you can replace the bun with lettuce and still call it a hamburger. And even if you get people to agree what a hamburger is, nobody is checking that the recipe is followed to the letter. Therefore, real hamburgers do not exist, and nobody can claim in good faith that they are making a hamburger. In fact, why don't we sue McDonalds for their fraud hamburgers?

> Science isn't self correcting.

The very fact that fraud is identified is clear evidence that is is not true. You are going to need to sharpen your rethorical devices if you want to argue against hundreds of years of scientific progress, including for example everything that enabled us to argue about this in front of our devices while barely 150 years ago people had to use candles to see each other after dinner. Mind you, not all of this was developed by industrial research labs, in fact the origins of very many modern technologies lie in academic research labs pursuing ideas that are too risky for a commercial entity to bet on. And of course there are plenty of examples of industrial fraud happening despite "managerial intervention" (lol).

Reality is more complex. Not many things, if at all, exist in this world under their platonic ideal form. That does not make them any less real. Yes, we all know that humans are not perfect, sometimes are selfish and chase money and power, not only in academia but also in business, politics, and so on. Wherever humans are involved this sometimes happens. But saying that nothing good ever happens because of this goes against everything one can see when looking out of the window. Scientific progress is real, and needs both industrial and academic labs.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#185

Post by CrazyStat »

esalman wrote: post #179
anon-3988 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Science isn't self correcting.... I am not sure what your proposal is? It seems to be the solution is only more science? This meme that science can't solve anything or is ineffective is also a meme that needs to die. Science is about the only thing that we have to make sense of the world. What else is there? > 1. What exactly is the scientific method? It's not like there's a constitutional amendment that lays it ou…

> it does not matter if Jesus did in fact born from a virgin mother, it is not repeatable, and therefore not scientific https://www.newscientist.com/article/1837276-the-boy-whose-b...

Even better, from the BMJ christmas edition https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102

> Around 0.5% of women consistently affirmed their status as virgins and did not use assisted reproductive technology, yet reported virgin births.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#188

Post by hermitcrab »

khy wrote: post #46
dgacmu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should - one of the papers that Data Colada reported on about Gino was co-authored with Dan Ariely: https://datacolada.org/98

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

Kudos to Data Colada for sticking to their guns and not being cowed by that law suit. More power to them.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#189

Post by FranklinMaillot »

Aurornis wrote: 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…

Beautifully ironic that "Dishonesty and ethics" is listed as one of his research fields.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#190

Post by bluGill »

iammjm wrote: post #128
bluGill wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go read it yourself. There isn't enough information to draw concussions. Everything is consistent with contact with a major funder who you can't cut off just because of evil in a part of life you knew nothing about. You can read the article with a bias and ignore his counter claims. However that is drawing a conclusion not warranted. Now perhaps someone has read the letters and seen other evidence and can draw conclu…

Asking THE sex trafficker pimp extraordinaire about the contact data of a “redhead”… I guess you CAN read this whole interaction as benevolent if you squint hard enough to the point that the nature of this guy’s transactions with people becomes invisible

I have a policy of "innocent until proven guilty". (even proven guilty doesn't mean guilty, but by that time so much evidence has been examined that odds are high enough to finally say guilty). All too often somebody pushes only evidence that supports their bias without full care for the full truth.

I agree it looks pretty bad, but I have not seen all the evidence and thus I must hold out the possibility he is innocent until someone does take the time to examine it all. That doesn't mean I think he is innocent, just that I'm carefully withholding judgement because I know I do not have all the facts. It also doesn't mean I'm against investigation of the facts - I just want the investigation done properly, and all discussions like this do not contribute to a proper investigation.

Post reply on HN