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Comment by pocketsand | Hacker News Reader

Seems like behavioral economics really just receives splash damage from what is the massive fraud at the heart of experimental social psychology. At this point I basically assume any catchy finding from the field is at best HARKed or p-hacked and at worst completely fraudulent.

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The field migrated to were the data is. Some communication dark departments within Meta and Google, sponsored by three letters.

You can even do ethical virtual experiments with the data of 3 billion people. Just specify the situation, the person and what's to happen.. Voila. All things happen regularly at some point..

> The field migrated to were the data is. Some communication dark departments within Meta and Google, sponsored by three letters.

You really need to clarify this.

I think it's pretty clear what the post is saying. It doesn't need to be clarified, it needs to be supported, though the nature of the claim is such that it would be tough to provide direct evidence.

I’m going with:

> The government is trying to control your mind through the internet

Same techniques (largely derived from psychology, statistics, sociology, etc) used in social media marketing, intent tracking, etc has uses in national security. Same thing that might let meta know you might be interested in batman pajamas can be used to sort out if you are being radicalized to action by some group. Interesting example is fractalrabbit.

Group of people who both have the theoretical training and practical experience is probably pretty small so private/public crossover isn't unreasonable.

Why aren't journals requiring pre-registration? It's an absolute catastrophe and no one seems to care!

Pre-registration protects against HARKing and p-hacking, but it unfortunately doesn't protect at all against outright fraud, which we appear to see from the likes of Ariely and Gino.

Right. Outright fraud needs to be dealt with much more severely. Total disgrace, loss of tenure, and potential prison time.

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