Guy on reddit raised this point and he turned out to be correct.
His whole world collapsed.
His whole life was built on lies and collapsed like a house of cards. Checkmate.
Seeing some interesting push back on the Jason Arday story noting how plagiarism stories involving professors from minorities get disproportionate coverage vs. stories about academic misconduct by white male professors. It seems like this Christian Rufo is going after minorities in high profile academic positions because he hates DEI and critical race theory.
As meep notes, a lot of universities are drifting along to some extent on racism. I wonder how many prominent white male profs would be found to have similar lapses in their own work as Arday or even just your average run of the mill academic.
Eta: an interesting follow up to the Gay plagiarism issue. Interesting to see how quickly conversation about Gorsuch’s plagiarism went by the wayside. Harvard’s Claudine Gay was ousted for ‘plagiarism’. How serious was it really? | Harvard University | The Guardian
Cofnas got suspended by his school (Ghent)
He has some pretty bad views about minorities in academia, but if they only suspended him because he pointed out the plagiariasm and fabulism, thats not ok either.
With quotes like these:
" Cofnas was sacked from his role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2024. In blog posts, he had said that, in a meritocracy: “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” In a piece titled “Don’t Scapegoat Women”, published in January this year, Cofnas claimed “women but not men can get people fired by pointing and crying”.
He added: “To meet de facto quotas, employers have had to reach deeper into the pool of less qualified female candidates. For obvious reasons, affirmative action hires often have a chip on their shoulder. Many of them turn to social justice activism to distract from the fact that they aren’t as good at their job as the straight white men who earned their position based on merit, or weren’t hired at all.”"
How was he still employed at a university in 2026? Those seem incredibly bigotted.
They hired him when they already knew his views. Thats the thing.
Can’t really pretend its all a surprise at this point.
Its also possible they were looking to get rid of him so the Arday suicide has allowed them to move forward on that.
Keep in mind, this is Belgium and they have very strong employment protections (more than UK).
Clearly the data back his bigotry.
Oh, he doesn’t need data?
It sort of goes to the point of some of the people pushing back on the Arday issue. White people get held to vastly lower standards than black people. Destroy the minority person who has some incidents of marginal plagiarism (e.g. they could have cited something better, but possibly not a huge component of the article) and give a second chance to the white person with the reprehensible behavior. They knew the guy was a massive racist and still hired him.
1 Like
It’s like it is a privlege or something.
1 Like
Here is the first page of Ghent’s letter suspending him.
Looks like his media comments fell very much outside what he was hired for (research wise).
Belgian employment law is complex, so either they pay him off to make him go away, or this ends up in Court.
The guy was a known ass before he was hired. Yet they hired him anyway.
There has to be a back-story to that decision. The guy has never been shy about publicly expressing his positions on race.
He was at Cambridge in 2024 (same views), his contract was not extended (Emmanuel College asked him to leave), and he then landed at Ghent. Looks like a downgrade in terms of position, so he may have been asked to leave and used Cambridge’s status to land a job at a lower ranked school.
More backstory here from Ghent. Turns out the school knew he was a Jewish supremacist and racist, and hired him anyways over the objections of the Dept. Sounds like someone pulled a few strings for him to get the job.
Well, now more on the Ariely data fraud
[138] Artificial Deadlines (Part 1): Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
Posted on August 31, 2026 by Uri, Joe, & Leif
A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment.” The original study, published in Psychological Science in 2002 (.htm), found that people performed better on a set of tasks when each task had its own externally imposed deadline than when people set their own deadlines or faced a single last-day deadline for all tasks. The paper has had a lasting influence. It has been assigned reading in many economics and psychology courses, and has more than 2,100 citations on Google Scholar.
Because this paper has been so influential, it is worthwhile to take a close look at the original study to try to understand why it did not replicate. We did that. This post – and the next one – is about what we found.
I will extract the red flags of the study, in terms of data falsification
Red Flag #1: The Effect Is Too Big
Red Flag #2: Duplicate Observations
Red Flag #3: Things That Should Be Very Highly Correlated Aren’t Correlated At All
I found the #3 one interesting
Red Flag #4: No Rounding In Self-Reported Minutes
I look forward to part 2
Historians aren’t so good with numbers sometimes…I’m docking this guy a star on goodreads because of those graphs.
yeah, that wasn’t the best way to convey the concepts
Here is part 2:
One figure that looks like a smoking gun:
So Here’s What We Think Happened
In the original manuscript, the authors reported that the Evenly Spaced Deadlines section did better than the Set Your Own Deadlines section. Because this could occur for many reasons, someone on the review team asked the authors to demonstrate that the deadlines were the driving force. One way to do that is to show that students who set evenly-spaced deadlines did as well as those assigned evenly-spaced deadlines.But when that analysis was run, it didn’t work. To make it work, some of the final grades had to be altered. The person doing the altering wanted to achieve two things at once: (1) generate the desired result, while (2) preserving the condition means, so that those means did not differ between the two versions of the manuscript. And so that is what they did. They altered the data while preserving the means. Now, that is not an easy thing to do, and so perhaps one of the 13 alterations had to go in the wrong direction, simply to get the means right. The authors now had reportable evidence that the differences in performance were due to the different deadlines rather than to something else.
The result? The publication of a paper that has had widespread (and continued) influence within the behavioral sciences.
1 Like
The paper has been retracted:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976261488042
I’m quoting the entire retraction notice:
Retraction: Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment
https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976261488042
At the request of the Journal Editor in Chief, the following article is retracted:
Ariely, D., & Wertenbroch, K. (2002). Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment. Psychological science, 13(3), 219–224.
A research article published in the journal [1] that aims to replicate a study in the aforementioned article, has raised questions about the underlying data in the original study. A dataset believed to relate to the original study has been shared, but its authenticity and completeness cannot be confirmed by the lead author of that research. In addition, an investigation undertaken by Data Colada [2, 3] has called into question the veracity of the overall findings of the original publication. As a result, the second author has requested this article is retracted from the journal.
Due to details brought to light by the replication manuscript during the review process, lack of confidence in the underlying datasets, and the results of the investigation by Data Colada that call into question the veracity of the data in the original article, the Journal Editor can no longer attest to the reliability of the article’s findings. In line with the guidance issued by COPE, the Journal Editor retracts this article.
Both authors agree with the retraction.
References
1. Hyndman, K., & Bisin, A. (2026). Replication of “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment”. Psychological Science, 37(8), 557–571.
3. [139] Artificial Deadlines (Part 2): Retrograding Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002) – Data Colada