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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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 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.
For your amusement, from the post:
> a week after Francesca Gino sued us for $25 million […]
That wasn’t successful but she also sued Harvard and won
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?
There is nothing scientific about psychology. There can be no science where everything is subjective.
Dan Ariely's fraud is pretty widespread.
He sold his research to an insurance company, who should have known better: https://www.lemonade.com/blog/oh-behave/
> 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).
Look up violet wands, you can shock humans with 0 training when it's a consensual hobby.
You can buy them without training, but that doesn’t mean you should be allowed to use them in a research setting on strangers without training.
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.
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.
The stats are from the Wikipedia page for ECT--I'm not sure about the base rate/risk ratio.
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.
That does sound rough. The initial shock, without sedation, could cause mild to moderate pain and would certainly be a scary experience.
Even then, though, it's a far cry from being the antiquated mental lobotomy that many people wrongly assume it to be.
> 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.
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Go read the article instead of nitpicking people doing the citations for you.
If you ask a known pedophile for funding and introductions while accepting favors, you can rightly be accused of bad judgment - at best.
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.
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.
> 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."
iirc Epstein funded the media lab and had an office there
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.
> The study seems extremely easy to replicate (no fancy equipment needed, just ask some people to proofread), and yet nobody did until now
They were just putting it off.
Why do we even accept anything as true without replication by default?
Why do people on this site love nutrition and self-medication fads?
People are surprisingly thoughtless.
Or as one might say, predictably irrational.
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’.
Are you a vendor of orgone accumulators or a staunch believer and customer?
How do you decide whether something works or not?
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.
> Is there some way to change incentives to get people to try and replicate?
Sure. Pay them to do it.
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.
Replicating superconductor experiment gives you the conductor and the skill.
Both of them are useful as is.
Replicating a social experiment, when successful, don't give you anything new.
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.
Then it "replication" becomes a target and thus would be gamed instead.
This is a constant tug of war..
I came here for a procrastination joke comment and didn't find it, but I suppose someone will get around to it eventually.
I’ll do it later
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.
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?
Every paper needs to include an independent replication of the study.
If only we had that level of science funding.
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
Figures, even the studies about procrastination are fraught with issues. Guess I'll put off reading the details until tomorrow.
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.
I'm glad the authors seem to have acknowledged the problem and not doing much about it :-)
Per the post, the original authors have requested that the original paper be retracted. That’s well above the bar of “not doing much”.
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."
The post is unambiguous if you make it to the very end, where there are particular statements from each of the people involved.
Look for:
> Klaus Wertenbroch […] indicated that he has asked the editor to retract the paper.
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!"
You're basically replacing the label "procrastination" with the label "laziness" without understanding anything.
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.
> Are there positive aspects to laziness?
Hard work often pays off in the future, but laziness always pays off now.
I don't even think procrastination is laziness as you end up having to do the work later.
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
> 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.
upvoted for an interesting and informative response. This is why I come to HN. Thanks :)
> 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.
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?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484925
They probably procrastinated all their deadlines and then fibbed things.
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.
Not to mention the Epstein ties.
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.
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).
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.
There is a lot of bad ML research for the same reason.
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.
The name of the place should be enough of a giveaway for any thinking person Center for Advanced Hindsight.
SMH.
Oh the irony...