Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination (datacolada.org)

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).

> 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.

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.

> 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."

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.

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

That wasn’t successful but she also sued Harvard and won

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 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

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.

Then it "replication" becomes a target and thus would be gamed instead.

This is a constant tug of war..

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.

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’.

If only we had that level of science funding.

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.

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.

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

> 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.