People for a long time have had far too much faith in peer review as and had a dim view of anything other then experimental results and work, despite how much fraud and just bad experiments their are. Not to mention how many variables their might actually be to account for in something like psychology or any of the social science's.
Deriving things from axioms and postulates alone is problematic but some one who can do both begins to actually do useful work in my opinion and some one who can accept the difficult their actually is in knowing anything about human psychology simply from studying it and underneath all experiments is assumptions and the people in the experiment who have so many variables. This is not like medicine human psychology is very flexible and for me though not a social scientist I feel of all theories of human psychology they are only applicable to people now and not even 300 years ago, though of course one must concede that the micro psychological principles might be applicable to humans more generally.
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 mathematics. I was excited to read it, but it didn't take long for me to find out that it's complete BS-derivations that don't follow, made-up equation terms, and conflation of basic terms in the field. I was really surprised that this passed the editor and at least two peer reviewers. I dug deeper and found that the same author has published 11 research articles in top journals in 2026 alone — mostly physics and chemistry, and adjacent fields— and I'm talking about really top journals like Scientific Reports and Physics Letters B. Most of these have serious mathematical flaws that are unfixable. I wrote to a couple of editors, but only one took it seriously enough to initiate an investigation. I made a promise to myself that if no real action is taken, I will seriously consider changing careers.
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 there's a constitutional amendment that lays it out. Try and pin people down and you'll discover nobody agrees on what science actually requires.
2. Even if some subset of people did write down a definition, nobody is checking anyone is following it.
So people conflate science the Platonic methodological ideal with Science™, the institutions that claim most forcefully to be its avatar. But those institutions have neither a definition nor any enforcement arm, so fraud and abuse runs rampant. There's no reason why anything should self correct in this environment outside of corporate science, where the self-correction mechanism is managerial intervention or, in the absence of that, bankruptcy.
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.
They wouldn't dread being included there, not at all. The institutions don't care about fraud and reflexively defend it, ignore it or shoot the messenger. Look at the Arday nonsense. People are still discovering new lies he was telling but Cambridge went to the mat for him.
Dan Ariely in particular has faced convincing fraud accusations for years:
Even as imperfect as it is, it's infinitely better than the alternatives like belief in religion/religious texts/pastors or anybody else who is just making shit up based on whatever they think sounds good. None of that is falsifiable or makes any attempt to iteratively arrive at anything true or real.
There is literally nothing better that we have other than the scientific method. Yes, science is self-correcting, even if it is slow or whatever else. Nothing else that we have can approach even that bar.
>I made a promise to myself that if no real action is taken, I will seriously consider changing careers.
Personally I think you should name and shame the author as well as the publications and the names of the peer "reviewers" who clearly did sweet-fuck-all.
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
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 his research.
The fraud that Data Colada presents here is unambiguous. It was also no accident in my opinion that they are specifically mentioning that the 3 Excel files were “Last saved by” “Dan Ariely”
I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired for this, but I really wish the Feds would prosecute cases like this as wire fraud instead of leaving insular academic institutions to self-police. This type of fraud is done for personal gain and self-enrichment and causes real, identifiable harms.
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 third party on behalf of the government, found guilty of faking their science for a decade+, paid the fine - and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it.
Prosecutors (and juries) already are expected to adjudicate fraud across cases that IMO are much more ambiguous than this.
I think it's fair to debate whether it's a good thing that, as I heard it put once, "everything is wire fraud" (i.e. lots of crimes require lying on documents that are sent electronically and thus become federal crimes), but I see zero reason to think that committing academic fraud (which, again, is done for personal gain and causes real, measurable harm to others) is any less of a crime than lots of other things that are prosecuted as wire fraud.
Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.
Do you know a trick to pay my bills in self-respect? Most of my creditors demand I pay in money.
Edit: For some reason this account has been restricted. Goodbye HN, see you on the next sockpuppet. I wasn't expecting an account named after a racial slur to last so long.
>Do you know a trick to pay my bills in self-respect? Most of my creditors demand I pay in money.
Nobody said that shit. You can pay your builds with the monetary salary from doing your job honestly. That was my first point.
If many people discover that such a salary is not enough to get by, or if many people aren't content with "enough to get by" and decide to perform academic fraud for extras, then that's a society that already lost the plot. That was my second point.
> leaving insular academic institutions to self-police
I'm not convinced that academic institutions are actually self-policing, it may not even be correct to assume they each act as one coherent entity. There are a lot of incentives in play which may not be obvious from the outside.
<apologies for yet another anecdote from way back when>
Many decades ago during my PhD I was in working in a chemistry lab when a colleague had an accident which caused a minor explosion, big enough to blow both of the glass side panes completely out of his fume hood.
With hindsight he was extremely lucky to have only minor injuries, he was peppered with tiny cuts from the flying glass and temporarily deaf from the bang.
I called for an ambulance, which seemed like a reasonable response.
The first prof on the scene (not our prof though!) came in and immediately asked "who phoned for the emergency services?", so I said it was me. He then gave me a bit of a telling-off, ending with him saying "and now the press will find out!" before he stormed off.
I remember thinking "wtf?! my colleague has just blown up our lab, and your top concern is that it will be in the newspapers"...
> 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 judge let her continue the suit against Harvard. Like “hey I plagiarized fine, but you focused on my plagiarism more than others’ that not fair”. Even as more retractions due to plagiarism kept coming…
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.
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 desired result (who'd ever know as long as you do it properly), changing the experiment and measure until they get what they they want, repeated measuring until the "right" data for the paper appeared randomly - those are all things I personally observed in the lab.
Not to even get started on the house of cards that is basing ones flawed assumptions on other flawed studies without even the slightest attempt at replicating their results first. It's standard practice to simply presume what's been published (especially by friendly authors) can be regarded as reliable.
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?
At this point the surprising part isn't that another Ariely result has problems, it's that some of these datasets apparently went decades without this kind of basic scrutiny
> It revealed that Ariely had a longstanding relationship with Epstein, including having visited him at his New York home on several occasions.[45] One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him
I mean, I've always consigned 100% of NYT self help slop to the bin of books for people who aren't smart but desperately want to seem like they but this is just a little much now, Dan
> 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 experiments involving things like electric shocks on human subjects?
Forget about this guy, the entire field needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
I would not make such a harsh judgment just because electric shocks are involved.
During my master’s I took a class at the Media Lab called Human 2.0 on prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons, and human augmentation. Unsurprisingly, all student final projects involved some form of human experimentation.
To run our final project’s experiments, we had to complete a few online modules on bioethics, first aid, and safe practices, as well as submit a proposal to the IRB. From what I saw across projects, the board applied appropriate scrutiny and made helpful contributions.
It classified our experiment as low risk, and a lot of care went into participant selection and adherence to the approved protocol, but they did not require any health professional to be present during the sessions.
Other projects, however, did require such support and even had some MIT Medical involvement.
Incidentally, my project also involved administering electrical shocks to subjects, albeit very mild ones (tACS to induce directed visual artifacts).
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 effects compared to e.g. SSRIs, and is very effective for severe depression. It's a huge shame that it's undeserved reputation prevents it from being more popular. Blame "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for its inaccurate portrayal.
ECT can be very, very unsafe. 70% of patients experience some form of memory loss and at least 30% of patients experience self-reported permanent memory loss. The rate of major adverse cardiac events found in a 2019 meta-analysis was 1 in 39 patients. For the people that it helps, I'm happy they've found relief, but it's a tool with significant costs and I know a fair amount of people who underwent it as children or otherwise were pressured to undergo it and I don't know any of them who have a positive impression of it.
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.
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.
> Do you think a potential bad actor would change their behavior
What is the appropriate way to help a righteous but underpaid lab assistant find the guts to call out a process as unethical and insist that the boss’s claim that the IRB has approved it is bogus?
The most important thing is they know how to report issues and have assurance that reports will not hurt them. If you can show other reports were acted on and the reporter not harmed that helps.
It also helps to always have more than one person who could call so they compete with each other to be first because they don't want to be the one seen as an accompanist to fraud.
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.
> 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.
> Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effects compared to e.g. SSRIs, and is very effective for severe depression.
The evidence base for these claims appears to be missing.
It's liked by some practitioners, not by others, but actual studies in this area are low quality, didn't follow up with longer term checks, and are generally inadequate.
"The failure to find any meaningful long-term benefits compared to placebo groups are particularly distressing."
Ah yes also the author of “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty”. The most amazing thing is he is still a professor at Duke. Wonder if he focused much on academic dishonesty in his book…
Institutions like Duke benefit enormously from having people like this around. They can claim they have lots of highly cited and well published researchers, a bit of controversy is free publicity, etc. They make money off him and so they defend him. It helps support the myth that they are good educational institutions. US private universities are grift mills.
This happens at any scale. Manager picks a bad candidate to join the team? Well now they are responsible for the decision. Their worth is tied to their bad decision and they will defend the bad choice to the detriment others on the team. So it’s an element of Duke also defending their honor since they invited and supposedly vetted him.
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.
This. Significant portions of the Epstein files are random noise. Though even for a popularish author it'd be strange to be in enough 1990-2018 news snippets to reach that many EF hits. In any case "is in the Epstein files" should in general be replaced with "is in the Epstein files, including this email to/from them I found"
The most interesting section from the large paragraph on Wikipedia: “One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him”
That still doesn't mean anything. Sure we know Epstein did evil, but not everything he did was evil. One should assume at least a few people he interacted with had no reason to suspect his evil actions.
I guess that's why the same passage says Ariely maintained the relationship long after the Epstein's pedophile convictions. Not definitive either, but pretty suggestive.
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 conclusions. However at this point I can't say who knew what.
Both people are of course evil, but they may or may not have an evil in common.
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
> The messages revealed that his friendship with Epstein lasted for nine years, including well after Epstein was initially charged with soliciting sex from a minor.[52] Ariely also suggested that Epstein use learnings from his research to help rehabilitate his public image
what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker
anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history
>what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker
>anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history
It's possible to denounce someone, but still push back on false claims. Otherwise you're just condoning misinformation just because it aligns with your beliefs . eg.
"Did you know Donald Trump literally eats babies?"
"Wtf are you talking about? There's no evidence of that."
"Wow, I can't believe you're defending a convicted felon, sex offender, and authoritarian! Anyone who's trying to rehab his image should be consigned to the dustbin of history."
I hope that with LLMs we'll see a lot faster identification of these anomalies. Imagine that this guy taught at MIT and has his own lab at Duke, basically more than 20 years of taking up some of the most prestigious positions in his field, all based on fraud.
The butterfly effect this has on science as a practice is huge. Some marginal researcher who actually deserved it was bumped out of those places, and somewhere down the line someone was bumped all the way out of academia because of this guy's lies. And this is hardly the only person in this situation.
What's scary is that the next fraudster will read this take down and see what they have to do to avoid detection. It wouldn't be that hard to form data that looks a lot more plausible. Replication may be the only solution, unfortunately it's so expensive and time consuming, without any of the actual benefits of doing the original study. Maybe it should be government funded, the US replication lab, its only mission to replicate the top X papers from some named fields each year.
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?
N.B. nobody needed to replicate this study. It only took basic sanity checks to spot that it was very unlikely to be true (and thus, very unlikely to replicate). And they went much further than needed. They could have stopped at "the claimed effect is much larger than the height difference between men and women". This obviousness is a common pattern:
> Prediction markets work well because predicting replication is easy. There's no need for a deep dive into the statistical methodology or a rigorous examination of the data, no need to scrutinize esoteric theories for subtle errors—these papers have obvious, surface-level problems.
So you could also say, how do we change the incentives to get people to peer review properly? That would be a lot cheaper.
The obvious solution is for people to get paid to audit work professionally, and be fired if they sign off on bad results. But that exists already, it's called a corporate lab. Managers are incentivized by carrots and sticks to properly understand what their researchers are doing and if anyone is doing fraud they will be fired, maybe prosecuted. Universities don't do this because so much of what they do exists purely to spend money, with no higher purpose. There's no specific goal or outcome they're trying to achieve, and so no reason to do unpleasant things like enforcing incentives to get there.
So in the end the solution is just to defund university research. The social structures are fundamentally unfixable. You'll never get people to care if the only purpose of their job's existence is to convince voters governments are funding science.
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.
And the incentives are arguably worse than QA: you get little credit if the result replicates, and potentially a lot of grief if it doesn't. Novel results build careers. Checking them mostly doesn't
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.
Universities, institutions and publications who care about their reputation should pay people to replicate studies performed by people they employ in their name. Otherwise they will loose their trustworthiness.
But perhaps it is not as big a shame for them as some think it should be...
> Meditation and mindfulness practices may have a variety of health benefits and may help people improve the quality of their lives. Recent studies have investigated if meditation or mindfulness helps people manage anxiety, stress, depression, pain, or symptoms related to withdrawal from nicotine, alcohol, or opioids.
> Other studies have looked at the effects of meditation or mindfulness on weight control or sleep quality.
> However, much of the research on these topics has been preliminary or not scientifically rigorous. Because the studies examined many different types of meditation and mindfulness practices, and the effects of those practices are hard to measure, results from the studies have been difficult to analyze and may have been interpreted too optimistically.
This is just a polite way of saying "there's no evidence of them actually doing anything*".
I mean, that's exactly what you'd tell someone who believed in the healing powers of homeopathy or chiropracty(sp?).
You don't. It is too costly and thus risky. Instead you do a charade and convince authorities (who just want to cover their asses citing some vetted studies) and people that your stuff work.
It is "ass covering" all the way. Not "does it work" all the way...
"easy to replicate (no fancy equipment needed, just ask some people to proofread)"
? This was a human subject study, that would cost $$ and there would be very little upside to confirmation and only a little notoriety with a failure to replicate (which by the way is not dispositive, people might need multiple failed replications to know who to believe, depending on the size of the replication). Maybe you didn't read the post: this was data fraud discovered by statistical irregularities. That is indeed becoming easy to spot with more widespread statistical literacy, at least for unsophisticated jobs like this from decades ago.
If the culture shifted such that people were skeptical of original results but excited about replication, replication would be the big news and people would want to do it. How to get there, I don't know.
I seem to remember a lot of hype about room-temperature superconductors, that croaked upon [lack of] replication. That wasn't too long ago.
Before that, cold fusion.
We still have the ion drive that doesn't require fuel. I don't think it has ever been successfully replicated, but I think that it also hasn't been successfully repudiated, either.
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. I suspect that not all of it is deliberate fraud, but rather, people wanting their preconceived bias to be satisfied.
No, that would never happen. People would just be skeptical of most findings until they see replications (where we are headed in the social sciences, anyway). If people see replications the original discoverer will get all the accolades, not the (several) replications.
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.
Your exact intuition about the implausibility of many large effect sizes is called the “Piranha problem” by my favourite statistician Andrew Gelman first here in a blog post:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/15/eats/
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.
Does some sort of batched style of research already exist? By batched, I mean a study where n number of teams all agree on a single methodology, and then conduct the same experiment simultaneously. Each team could then publish their results independently and the teams could publish one aggregate.
I know meta studies attempt to do this in a way, but they can sometimes have their own problems too.
I cannot recall coming across this style of research in much of what I have read as a hobby, but maybe it is more common in some domains than others? I am not smart, and there is nothing new under the Sun, so surely something like this exists, no?
Not quite what you're asking, but pre-registration does alleviate e.g. p-hacking and such without the need for multiple teams. It doesn't do much for outright fraud, but still...
In the physical sciences, any sufficiently important paper is independently verified. Sounds like cost/effort of these multi year studies is not faesible to replicate, but then again, I know nothing about social science so w/e
Actually the post is ambiguous: did the authors want the original article retracted, or the replication by Hyndman and Bisin? I hope the former!
"Finally, it should be noted that when we shared these posts with Ariely and Wertenbroch a few weeks ago, they reached out to Psychological Science to request that the article be retracted. As of this writing, that process is ongoing."
Having skimmed this article and the replication study itself (which references some studies that complicate our common understanding of the positive effects of deadlines) I’m left wondering what the constructive alternative is to deadlines and/or how deadlines should be maintained or determined.
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 he'd have to say in a podcast about this topic:
"Fraud in a procrastination study? You don't say! I don't understand why all this taxpayer money is going to study procrastination in the first place. Procrastination is a well-known phenomenon with a well-understood cause: laziness. Procrastinators didn't have a boot placed to their behinds growing up, so they reached adulthood slacking and coasting on their trust-fund money or couch-surfing at their friends' places, mooching off others. You see this a lot in modern software organizations, especially among the programmers. And now those programmers are all crying because they're about to get replaced by Claude Code. Boo hoo! The military knew how to deal with procrastinators, too: send them to scrub latrines with a toothbrush, and drum them out if they didn't shape up after that! We don't need millions of dollars in government grants going to academic research to study this phenomenon. It's as old as humanity itself—we called it the deadly sin of sloth. Friends, keep the faith!"
I am not lazy (for work. I am in my personal life) but when I procrastinate it's due to lack of clarity or due to issues acquiring focus. Both I have ways to address, so I completely agree with you
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):
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?":
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.
> and that business has for centuries and will continue to operate as if what he believed were true
Then maybe we should do away with "business". Small operations do not tend to operate that way, and broadly everyone prefers their output (if not price) in the domains in which they operate – with a few notable exceptions. In theory, software should allow small operations to each serve millions of people, such that we (e.g.) only need a few thousand search engine providers to meet the needs of the entire world's population. Not everything has to be enterprise-scale, and indeed many things should not be.
If "business" means treating people badly, then we don't need it.
At the risk of bringing up a controversial topic, in the midst of the Jason Arday furore last month when everyone was like "this wouldn't happen to a white professor", the person who kept coming to mind for me was Ariely. I became a data scientist in no small part due to his early work, and seeing academia totally incapable of punishing him is deeply disappointing.
Short of blindly outsourcing the work to an LLM and checking to see if its hallucinated problems are actually problems[0], how can more laymen (without the ability to run replication studies, and without degrees in statistics) learn to more easily identify questionable/potentially fraudulent research like this?
This is a question that has been really bothering me for a while. I have a short list of things I’ve learnt to check, but it’s all stuff I’ve picked up in a very ad hoc way (reading and listening to these kinds of critical analyses, mostly). For example, until now, I wouldn’t think about implausibly large Cohen’s d, despite this seeming like an easily generalisable rule that anyone could eyeball. But without being told, and without the reference points given in the article, I wouldn’t have a clue. And I would like to have more of a clue. And I would like other people to have more of a clue. How?
The reason why people(or ai agents) have not been able to systematically destroy bad research in fields where fraud is so rampant is because they data are not published or easily accessible without emailing the author and asking them.
I sincerely hope that any self respectful journal that publishes papers should have a minimum bar: submit the data on a public link with no paywall or blockers and feature the link prominently on your paper.
Dan Ariely remaining at Duke, after it has become clear that much if not most of his work is fraudulent, is at least as big a black mark for Duke as Jason Arday was for Cambridge.
It's arguably worse. Jason Arday was doing qualitative work in education. Nobody pays any attention to anything UK educationalists write. Dan Ariely was a genuine superstar and writer of popular bestsellers (with academic content).
Dan Ariely was one of the biggest disappointments and betrayals of my intellectual life. I found the "research" he did to be mind-blowing, groundbreaking stuff at the time, and I told many people his work, sharing his papers and podcasts as a true enthusiast.
I am astonished that he holds an academic-adjacent position anywhere, no matter what his regrets might be today. Private redemption shouldn't be out of reach, but it shouldn't be possible for him to hold a position at any institution concerned with uncovering Truth. He should have resigned out of respect, if his institution was too gutless to do so. It's a tragedy.
And yet it will live forever, just like Dunning-Kruger despite its statistical issues. I fully expect to see it cited during some workshop or other pointless training exercise.
Deriving things from axioms and postulates alone is problematic but some one who can do both begins to actually do useful work in my opinion and some one who can accept the difficult their actually is in knowing anything about human psychology simply from studying it and underneath all experiments is assumptions and the people in the experiment who have so many variables. This is not like medicine human psychology is very flexible and for me though not a social scientist I feel of all theories of human psychology they are only applicable to people now and not even 300 years ago, though of course one must concede that the micro psychological principles might be applicable to humans more generally.
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 there's a constitutional amendment that lays it out. Try and pin people down and you'll discover nobody agrees on what science actually requires.
2. Even if some subset of people did write down a definition, nobody is checking anyone is following it.
So people conflate science the Platonic methodological ideal with Science™, the institutions that claim most forcefully to be its avatar. But those institutions have neither a definition nor any enforcement arm, so fraud and abuse runs rampant. There's no reason why anything should self correct in this environment outside of corporate science, where the self-correction mechanism is managerial intervention or, in the absence of that, bankruptcy.
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.
That cheaters would dread being included there (would probably be a thick journal too)
Dan Ariely in particular has faced convincing fraud accusations for years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Controversies_and_c...
Nothing ever happens. Universities do not care.
Universities will start caring of enrolment goes down.
There is literally nothing better that we have other than the scientific method. Yes, science is self-correcting, even if it is slow or whatever else. Nothing else that we have can approach even that bar.
Personally I think you should name and shame the author as well as the publications and the names of the peer "reviewers" who clearly did sweet-fuck-all.
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 his research.
I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired for this, but I really wish the Feds would prosecute cases like this as wire fraud instead of leaving insular academic institutions to self-police. This type of fraud is done for personal gain and self-enrichment and causes real, identifiable harms.
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 third party on behalf of the government, found guilty of faking their science for a decade+, paid the fine - and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it.
I think it's fair to debate whether it's a good thing that, as I heard it put once, "everything is wire fraud" (i.e. lots of crimes require lying on documents that are sent electronically and thus become federal crimes), but I see zero reason to think that committing academic fraud (which, again, is done for personal gain and causes real, measurable harm to others) is any less of a crime than lots of other things that are prosecuted as wire fraud.
The only thing that really works is a culture where this rarely if ever happens, because of the peer respect and self-respect of academics.
Edit: For some reason this account has been restricted. Goodbye HN, see you on the next sockpuppet. I wasn't expecting an account named after a racial slur to last so long.
Nobody said that shit. You can pay your builds with the monetary salary from doing your job honestly. That was my first point.
If many people discover that such a salary is not enough to get by, or if many people aren't content with "enough to get by" and decide to perform academic fraud for extras, then that's a society that already lost the plot. That was my second point.
I'm not convinced that academic institutions are actually self-policing, it may not even be correct to assume they each act as one coherent entity. There are a lot of incentives in play which may not be obvious from the outside.
<apologies for yet another anecdote from way back when>
Many decades ago during my PhD I was in working in a chemistry lab when a colleague had an accident which caused a minor explosion, big enough to blow both of the glass side panes completely out of his fume hood.
With hindsight he was extremely lucky to have only minor injuries, he was peppered with tiny cuts from the flying glass and temporarily deaf from the bang.
I called for an ambulance, which seemed like a reasonable response.
The first prof on the scene (not our prof though!) came in and immediately asked "who phoned for the emergency services?", so I said it was me. He then gave me a bit of a telling-off, ending with him saying "and now the press will find out!" before he stormed off.
I remember thinking "wtf?! my colleague has just blown up our lab, and your top concern is that it will be in the newspapers"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
> 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 judge let her continue the suit against Harvard. Like “hey I plagiarized fine, but you focused on my plagiarism more than others’ that not fair”. Even as more retractions due to plagiarism kept coming…
> a week after Francesca Gino sued us for $25 million […]
He sold his research to an insurance company, who should have known better: https://www.lemonade.com/blog/oh-behave/
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 desired result (who'd ever know as long as you do it properly), changing the experiment and measure until they get what they they want, repeated measuring until the "right" data for the paper appeared randomly - those are all things I personally observed in the lab.
Not to even get started on the house of cards that is basing ones flawed assumptions on other flawed studies without even the slightest attempt at replicating their results first. It's standard practice to simply presume what's been published (especially by friendly authors) can be regarded as reliable.
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?
I mean, I've always consigned 100% of NYT self help slop to the bin of books for people who aren't smart but desperately want to seem like they but this is just a little much now, Dan
A one-hour online training is all that’s needed to be considered ready to conduct experiments involving things like electric shocks on human subjects?
Forget about this guy, the entire field needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
During my master’s I took a class at the Media Lab called Human 2.0 on prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons, and human augmentation. Unsurprisingly, all student final projects involved some form of human experimentation.
To run our final project’s experiments, we had to complete a few online modules on bioethics, first aid, and safe practices, as well as submit a proposal to the IRB. From what I saw across projects, the board applied appropriate scrutiny and made helpful contributions.
It classified our experiment as low risk, and a lot of care went into participant selection and adherence to the approved protocol, but they did not require any health professional to be present during the sessions.
Other projects, however, did require such support and even had some MIT Medical involvement.
Incidentally, my project also involved administering electrical shocks to subjects, albeit very mild ones (tACS to induce directed visual artifacts).
Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6bJHalRnX4
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 effects compared to e.g. SSRIs, and is very effective for severe depression. It's a huge shame that it's undeserved reputation prevents it from being more popular. Blame "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for its inaccurate portrayal.
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?
About 1 in 50 patients may experience a major cardiac event (or death) during the course of ECT
I don't mean to pick on you. This problem is widespread in academic research.
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.
What is the appropriate way to help a righteous but underpaid lab assistant find the guts to call out a process as unethical and insist that the boss’s claim that the IRB has approved it is bogus?
It also helps to always have more than one person who could call so they compete with each other to be first because they don't want to be the one seen as an accompanist to fraud.
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.
Even then, though, it's a far cry from being the antiquated mental lobotomy that many people wrongly assume it to be.
The evidence base for these claims appears to be missing.
https://theconversation.com/no-evidence-that-ect-works-for-d...
It's liked by some practitioners, not by others, but actual studies in this area are low quality, didn't follow up with longer term checks, and are generally inadequate.
"The failure to find any meaningful long-term benefits compared to placebo groups are particularly distressing."
Yikes.
He may be innocent, but he certainly has a large stain and stink about him.
If you ask a known pedophile for funding and introductions while accepting favors, you can rightly be accused of bad judgment - at best.
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 conclusions. However at this point I can't say who knew what.
Both people are of course evil, but they may or may not have an evil in common.
what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker
anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history
>anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history
It's possible to denounce someone, but still push back on false claims. Otherwise you're just condoning misinformation just because it aligns with your beliefs . eg.
"Did you know Donald Trump literally eats babies?"
"Wtf are you talking about? There's no evidence of that."
"Wow, I can't believe you're defending a convicted felon, sex offender, and authoritarian! Anyone who's trying to rehab his image should be consigned to the dustbin of history."
Not to say that tilting things in their direction is a good idea, but that's a pretty wide class of beneficiaries.
The butterfly effect this has on science as a practice is huge. Some marginal researcher who actually deserved it was bumped out of those places, and somewhere down the line someone was bumped all the way out of academia because of this guy's lies. And this is hardly the only person in this situation.
What's scary is that the next fraudster will read this take down and see what they have to do to avoid detection. It wouldn't be that hard to form data that looks a lot more plausible. Replication may be the only solution, unfortunately it's so expensive and time consuming, without any of the actual benefits of doing the original study. Maybe it should be government funded, the US replication lab, its only mission to replicate the top X papers from some named fields each year.
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?
https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
N.B. nobody needed to replicate this study. It only took basic sanity checks to spot that it was very unlikely to be true (and thus, very unlikely to replicate). And they went much further than needed. They could have stopped at "the claimed effect is much larger than the height difference between men and women". This obviousness is a common pattern:
https://www.fantasticanachronism.com/p/whats-wrong-with-soci...
> Prediction markets work well because predicting replication is easy. There's no need for a deep dive into the statistical methodology or a rigorous examination of the data, no need to scrutinize esoteric theories for subtle errors—these papers have obvious, surface-level problems.
So you could also say, how do we change the incentives to get people to peer review properly? That would be a lot cheaper.
The obvious solution is for people to get paid to audit work professionally, and be fired if they sign off on bad results. But that exists already, it's called a corporate lab. Managers are incentivized by carrots and sticks to properly understand what their researchers are doing and if anyone is doing fraud they will be fired, maybe prosecuted. Universities don't do this because so much of what they do exists purely to spend money, with no higher purpose. There's no specific goal or outcome they're trying to achieve, and so no reason to do unpleasant things like enforcing incentives to get there.
So in the end the solution is just to defund university research. The social structures are fundamentally unfixable. You'll never get people to care if the only purpose of their job's existence is to convince voters governments are funding science.
“It’s not novel”.
But perhaps it is not as big a shame for them as some think it should be...
They were just putting it off.
People are surprisingly thoughtless.
Yoga, breathing exercises, meditation and the like were once considered fads and derided by your ‘science’.
What do you mean "once"?
> Other studies have looked at the effects of meditation or mindfulness on weight control or sleep quality.
> However, much of the research on these topics has been preliminary or not scientifically rigorous. Because the studies examined many different types of meditation and mindfulness practices, and the effects of those practices are hard to measure, results from the studies have been difficult to analyze and may have been interpreted too optimistically.
This is just a polite way of saying "there's no evidence of them actually doing anything*".
I mean, that's exactly what you'd tell someone who believed in the healing powers of homeopathy or chiropracty(sp?).
It is "ass covering" all the way. Not "does it work" all the way...
? This was a human subject study, that would cost $$ and there would be very little upside to confirmation and only a little notoriety with a failure to replicate (which by the way is not dispositive, people might need multiple failed replications to know who to believe, depending on the size of the replication). Maybe you didn't read the post: this was data fraud discovered by statistical irregularities. That is indeed becoming easy to spot with more widespread statistical literacy, at least for unsophisticated jobs like this from decades ago.
Sure. Pay them to do it.
Before that, cold fusion.
We still have the ion drive that doesn't require fuel. I don't think it has ever been successfully replicated, but I think that it also hasn't been successfully repudiated, either.
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. I suspect that not all of it is deliberate fraud, but rather, people wanting their preconceived bias to be satisfied.
Both of them are useful as is.
Replicating a social experiment, when successful, don't give you anything new.
Physics solved this quite some time ago.
This is a constant tug of war..
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.
And then as a published paper: https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/research/published/pi...
> how many explanatory variables can have large effects on an outcome?
Too soon; they'll all do it later.
Otoh, not sure that anyone wants to read a report that some finding that nobody reported on couldn't be replicated.
I know meta studies attempt to do this in a way, but they can sometimes have their own problems too.
I cannot recall coming across this style of research in much of what I have read as a hobby, but maybe it is more common in some domains than others? I am not smart, and there is nothing new under the Sun, so surely something like this exists, no?
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/replicatio...
There are some completed which is cool. I agree that this seems like a great initiative.
If you think replication in the sciences is in crises, wait till you see the field of psychology.
"Finally, it should be noted that when we shared these posts with Ariely and Wertenbroch a few weeks ago, they reached out to Psychological Science to request that the article be retracted. As of this writing, that process is ongoing."
Look for:
> Klaus Wertenbroch […] indicated that he has asked the editor to retract the paper.
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:
"Fraud in a procrastination study? You don't say! I don't understand why all this taxpayer money is going to study procrastination in the first place. Procrastination is a well-known phenomenon with a well-understood cause: laziness. Procrastinators didn't have a boot placed to their behinds growing up, so they reached adulthood slacking and coasting on their trust-fund money or couch-surfing at their friends' places, mooching off others. You see this a lot in modern software organizations, especially among the programmers. And now those programmers are all crying because they're about to get replaced by Claude Code. Boo hoo! The military knew how to deal with procrastinators, too: send them to scrub latrines with a toothbrush, and drum them out if they didn't shape up after that! We don't need millions of dollars in government grants going to academic research to study this phenomenon. It's as old as humanity itself—we called it the deadly sin of sloth. Friends, keep the faith!"
Are all people who postpone a task lazy?
What constitutes laziness? Can we define laziness?
Why are people lazy? Is laziness negative? Are there positive aspects to laziness? Why did we evolve laziness?
Are people consistently lazy, or are they only lazy in some areas of their lives?
Does scrubbing a toilet with a toothbrush actually reduce laziness? Are there other methods of reducing it?
What are the effects of reducing laziness? Are there emotional or physical penalties from reducing laziness?
Answering some of these would be useful. Just saying "everyone who procrastinates is lazy" is not.
Hard work often pays off in the future, but laziness always pays off now.
Defered tasks are sometimes completed by others, or otherwise become obsolete while you wait.
If he's anything like how the rest of your post read, he sounds like a pretty awful person.
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.
Then maybe we should do away with "business". Small operations do not tend to operate that way, and broadly everyone prefers their output (if not price) in the domains in which they operate – with a few notable exceptions. In theory, software should allow small operations to each serve millions of people, such that we (e.g.) only need a few thousand search engine providers to meet the needs of the entire world's population. Not everything has to be enterprise-scale, and indeed many things should not be.
If "business" means treating people badly, then we don't need it.
This is a question that has been really bothering me for a while. I have a short list of things I’ve learnt to check, but it’s all stuff I’ve picked up in a very ad hoc way (reading and listening to these kinds of critical analyses, mostly). For example, until now, I wouldn’t think about implausibly large Cohen’s d, despite this seeming like an easily generalisable rule that anyone could eyeball. But without being told, and without the reference points given in the article, I wouldn’t have a clue. And I would like to have more of a clue. And I would like other people to have more of a clue. How?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484925
I sincerely hope that any self respectful journal that publishes papers should have a minimum bar: submit the data on a public link with no paywall or blockers and feature the link prominently on your paper.
Not to mention the Epstein ties.
I am astonished that he holds an academic-adjacent position anywhere, no matter what his regrets might be today. Private redemption shouldn't be out of reach, but it shouldn't be possible for him to hold a position at any institution concerned with uncovering Truth. He should have resigned out of respect, if his institution was too gutless to do so. It's a tragedy.
SMH.