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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
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.
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.
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.
Yikes.
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?
People are surprisingly thoughtless.
Yoga, breathing exercises, meditation and the like were once considered fads and derided by your ‘science’.
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.
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!"
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.
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.