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Posted by timr 1/25/2026

A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times(statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
715 points | 373 commentspage 6
tejtm 1/25/2026|
It has been a viable strategy at least since Taylor 1911
dist-epoch 1/25/2026||
In the past the elite would rule the plebs by saying "God says so, so you must do this".

Today the elites rule the plebs by saying "Science sasy so, so you must do this".

Author doesn't seem to understand this, the purpose of research papers is to be gospel, something to be believed, not scrutinized.

graemep 1/25/2026||
In fact, religious ideas (at least in Europe) were often in opposition to the ruling elite (and still are) and even inspired rebellion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)

There is a reason scriptures were kept away from the oppressed, or only made available to them in a heavily censored form (e.g. the Slaves Bible).

Throaway1982 1/25/2026|||
A little more complicated than that.

In the past, the elites said "don't read the religious texts, WE will tell you what's in them."

jltsiren 1/25/2026|||
That's a misunderstanding. There were plenty of ancient and medieval translations of the Bible, but the Bible itself wasn't as central as it is today.

Catholic and Orthodox Christianity do not focus as much on the Bible as Protestant Christianity. They are based on the tradition, of which the Bible is only a part, while the Protestant Reformation elevated the Bible above the tradition. (By a tortured analogy, you could say that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are common law Christianity, while Protestantism is civil law Christianity.)

From a Catholic or Orthodox perspective, there is a living tradition from the days of Jesus and the Apostles to present day. Some parts of it were written down and became the New Testament, but the parts that were left out were equally important. You cannot therefore understand the Bible without understanding the tradition, because it's only a partial account.

mike_hearn 1/25/2026|||
Scientists say that today too, it's a standard response if people outside of academia critique their work. "That person is not an expert" - totally normal response, it's taken to be a killer rebuttal by journalists and politicians.
Throaway1982 1/25/2026||
Not exactly...in the past the Bible was literally not allowed to be translated from Latin into local languages. Ordinary people were 100% reliant on the elites to tell them what was in it.
mike_hearn 1/25/2026||
Yes it's less harsh now, but it's a matter of degree and has improved in recent times. Even today many papers aren't open access.
abanana 1/25/2026||
That's a very good point. Some of what's called "science" today, in popular media and coming from governments, is religion. "We know all, do not question us." It's the common problem of headlines along the lines of "scientists say" or "The Science says", which should always be a red flag - but the majority of people believe it.
globalnode 1/26/2026||
non researcher here -- how does one go about checking if a paper or article has been reproduced? just google it?
SegfaultSeagull 1/25/2026||
For all the outrage at Trump, RFK, and their Know-Nothing posture toward the world, we should recognize that the ground for their rise was fertilized by manure produced in academia.
jackconsidine 1/25/2026||
Anyone know the VP who referenced the paper? Doesn't seem to be mentioned. My best guess is Gore.

Living VPs Joe Biden — VP 2009–2017 (became President in 2021; after that he’s called a former VP and former president)

Not likely the one referenced after 2017 because he became president in 2021, so later citations would likely call him a former president instead of former VP.

Dan Quayle — VP 1989–1993, alive through 2026

Al Gore — VP 1993–2001, alive through 2026

Mike Pence — VP 2017–2021, alive through 2026

Kamala Harris — VP 2021–2025, alive through 2026

J.D. Vance — VP 2025–present (as of 2026)

shermozle 1/27/2026||
Management WHAT?
spwa4 1/26/2026||
The problem with psychology and the social sciences in general is that they're not neutral. The original justification for having management at all is something called "scientific management".

The argument is that if you have a company, in the original meaning of a group of people working together with people individually paid per item they produce, where "new employees" (between quotes because they're not paid at that point) essentially train with more experienced employees to start producing more. The idea of management, introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor, is to have people specifically dedicated to studying and improving the workflow of people, to become experts at making the workflow better, now known as "Taylorism". That justified middle management, in that this optimization would increase a company's productivity, and that lead to people doing what middle management still does. Before Taylorism, outside of the company owners, employees competed for wages in a competition like in "Monsters, Inc", with no-one reporting to anyone.

There's a slight issue: Frederick Winslow Taylor was a con man. The experiment, introducing management, in reality lowered productivity by about 20%. It did not raise it. He kept "scientific records", measurements of productivity in a notebook and that notebook was presented to the owners of the railway. Turns out, he faked the numbers, both directly by just presenting fake numbers and by paying the company (as in the individual workers) more by faking accounts, resulting in a temporary boost in productivity. Oops.

Repeated experiments showed the same. Having everyone in a company directly responsible for the functioning of the company as a whole, by being held responsible, financially, for their own work, works ... better than having management layers, according to the experiments done on the subject. You will find the social sciences defend an entirely different view. Oops.

Has psychology or social sciences changed social sciences (specifically organizational psychology's) view on either Taylor or Scientific Management? No. They used it as one of the bases of the rest of psychology, of the rest of social sciences as if it was good science.

This was not the first, not the last, and certainly not the most serious problem in psychology or social sciences.

Some other famous problematic science. The Stanford prison experiment was faked [1]. Oops. No, that is not why people attack each other, it turns out it works far more direct. The Freudian view of psychology is not only thoroughly discredited, it is now strongly suspected that Sigmund Freud deliberately created this view to allow raping of women [2] (Freud is the person that created modern psychoanalysis, and he earned the equivalent of billions of dollars for getting rapists of the hook in court, he even had a few "successes", cases were rape victims got imprisoned, by order of a court that knew they were rape victims, in cases were the rapist was on trial. He got paid the very big Guilders for that). With that, of course, comes the reality that Freud was not an innocent scientist that came up with a wrong conclusion but a con man who caused incredible suffering for thousands of women, and hundreds of men (usually girls and boys that got raped). Autism is not an explanation of a condition of the human mind but, in the words of the creator/discoverer of Autism, Hans Asperger "serves to purify the genes of the noble Aryan race" [3] (note: yes, Autism's purpose was to purify genes by executing children). We know that being the victim of a crime raises the odds of the victim later imitating the perpetrator and committing the same crime, and to make matters worse this is a strong effect in unrelated adults, but it's stronger in adolescents, and also again stronger within families compared to between unrelated people. Note: this is not revenge, it's imitation. Victims commit the crime they were victimized by against other people, NOT the perpetrator (although if you look at it game theoretically it explains why human societies choose revenge punishments). Oops.

Psychology and social sciences are not positivist sciences. The purpose is not to explain the human mind, but to justify predetermined outcomes. Especially the "discovery of Autism" illustrates this perfectly. Autism does not explain the behavior of some children, not back then, not now, and back then it justified the locking up and even executions of undesirable children, something the political climate between the two world wars really wanted to happen. Yes, you see the reverse now, but only because the political climate has changed again, not because the attitude of those sciences has changed, and you should not be surprised that if Trump stays and, say, Le Pen gets into power in France, new "psychological discoveries" will ... suddenly turn out to justify what ICE is doing, and no doubt, worse. In fact I'd argue that's exactly what's starting to happen [4].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_Coverup (although frankly, look up what Freud's theory actually says and do you really need someone to tell you that is bullshit? Freud claims the only source of motivation for men and boys is to kill their father and rape their mother. And the only source of motivation for women and girls is to seduce men to rape them, preferably their own family. The point of Freud's theories, according to Freud's colleagues, is that it played really well in court: if a father raped his daughters or granddaughters or nieces or ... then he could not help it, it is human nature, and those daughters and nieces (and occasionally sons and nephews) really were really behind getting him to do it. Hence how does it make sense to punish him? Oh and Freud also offered services to treat/imprison those children/girls/women, of course at very high prices)

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/children-genetics-race...

burgh 1/25/2026|
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