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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

#31
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

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

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#32

No paper should ever be referenced until it has been replicated by an independent group. The replication crisis in science is real, and it won't take long for no one to believe anything anymore.

That rule would make it difficult to report on a failure to replicate a published paper.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#33
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2006, when he was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, Ariely conducted experiments including administering electric shocks with a research assistant who had no human–subject training. […] Ariely confirmed this and said that he wasn't aware that the research assistant did not have the needed one-hour online human–subject training. A one-hour online training is all that’s needed to be considered ready to conduct exp…

I don't know the details here but I am a psychologist. The "electric shock" normally used in psych studies is tiny, it's like the equivalent of one of those little toy prank buzzers. You couldn't possibly hurt someone with it, this is really a non-issue. Related side note: Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effe…

> Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effects Blame "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for its inaccurate portrayal.

YMMV. I’ve encountered people who have had ECT forced on them whilst inadequately sedated. They have been older/elderly but it would be a mistake assuming it’s always without causing harm.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the details here but I am a psychologist. The "electric shock" normally used in psych studies is tiny, it's like the equivalent of one of those little toy prank buzzers. You couldn't possibly hurt someone with it, this is really a non-issue. Related side note: Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effe…

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t even thinking about the physical danger when I was… shocked… that you only need a one hour online course. It’s that they’re interacting with people in a somewhat clinical way as an implicit authority. The shock would obviously cause discomfort and therefore stress (or why even do it).

Do you think a potential bad actor would change their behavior if they took, say, a 12 hour course instead?

I am of course biased, but I have often been exasperated by the various "trainings", IRB processes, ethics classes, etc, that are required to run even basic psychology studies such as surveys.

Meanwhile, down the hall, the medical department is opening the skulls of mice, implanting electrodes, giving them supercancer, and then euthanizing them en masse. Often with less approval burden.

The hard truth is that it's tricky to decide what's ethical in science; we mostly allow or disallow things because they've been done that way for years, and all the added "process" is nothing but paper pushing and ass covering to quiet concerned outsiders.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#35
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no alternative to deadlines because time is money, and those downstream of you can ill afford to wait on your deliverables. Part of management's job is to determine how much time it should take so a reasonable timetable that stakeholders can agree to can be set, and then hold you accountable for delivering within that time frame. I wish we could revive Tim Bryce's mind with AI, because I'd love to hear what…

> I wish we could revive Tim Bryce's mind with AI, because I'd love to hear what he'd have to say in a podcast about this topic: If he's anything like how the rest of your post read, he sounds like a pretty awful person.

Well, no, he was not a pleasant person. Back in the day he was a management consultant, best known for an essay which rustled many programmer jimmies at the time: "Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers" (2005):

https://web.archive.org/web/20190416200125/https://it.toolbo...

Theory P advances the thesis that because programmers are lazy pseudointellectuals who chafe at discipline and use their arcane technical knowledge to gain power and leverage in the workplace, they need to be tightly managed, their small roles within the company clearly delineated, and discipline and organization strictly enforced.

A more recent (2018) essay of his is much more blunt and to the point, shows that he hadn't changed his mind at all, and concludes with "Is it any wonder why I despise programmers?":

https://patch.com/florida/palmharbor/amp/28237018/the-proble...

The, ahem, problem with Tim Bryce is twofold:

a) for good or ill, he said what your boss—or at least top management at your company—was thinking

b) he was right about many things. He was an exponent of PRIDE, the first widely available commercial software development methodology created by his father, Milt Bryce. Unlike Scrum or even SAFe, which are more like loose frameworks, PRIDE is a complete soup-to-nuts instruction manual on how to develop, implement, and integrate business information systems (including, but not limited to, those which operate via computer). As Bryce himself said: "PRIDE answers the 5 W's of information systems: WHO is to perform WHAT task, WHERE, WHEN, and WHY." PRIDE is pretty much Spec-Driven Development writ large; in PRIDE, the majority of the work and the source of nearly all the value is in systems analysis, not programming: determining how the business operates and what information systems need to be in place to support the business. This is stepwise-refined into a series of more and more detailed specifications, which are only then handed off to programmers to code. Doing it this way saves time and money and leads to more correct software on the first go. It's also pretty close to the state of the art in AI agentic workflows.

Tim Bryce would be giddy with glee had he lived to see today, because finally all those lazy programmers would be put out of work! Since under PRIDE, programming is mere translation of requirements into code, that can now be automated and asymptotically approaches requiring no human effort at all! The fact that you and I dislike his personality doesn't change the fact that what he advocated for is exactly what's happening now, and that business has for centuries and will continue to operate as if what he believed were true—including the bits about procrastination being simple laziness, correctable with stricter discipline, rather than some sort of complex psychological phenomenon.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#36
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’.

How do you decide whether something works or not?

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#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.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t even thinking about the physical danger when I was… shocked… that you only need a one hour online course. It’s that they’re interacting with people in a somewhat clinical way as an implicit authority. The shock would obviously cause discomfort and therefore stress (or why even do it).

Do you think a potential bad actor would change their behavior if they took, say, a 12 hour course instead? I am of course biased, but I have often been exasperated by the various "trainings", IRB processes, ethics classes, etc, that are required to run even basic psychology studies such as surveys. Meanwhile, down the hall, the medical department is opening the skulls of mice, implanting electrodes, giving them supe…

It’s not about bad actors. It’s about putting untrained people in a position where subjects might be vulnerable and come to depend on them being the trusted expert in the room.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#39

No paper should ever be referenced until it has been replicated by an independent group. The replication crisis in science is real, and it won't take long for no one to believe anything anymore.

That rule would make it difficult to report on a failure to replicate a published paper.

Every paper needs to include an independent replication of the study.

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

#40
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

For your amusement, from the post:

> a week after Francesca Gino sued us for $25 million […]

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