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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5018 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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Some fun additional thoughts:

  • The experimental protocol is described as producing three "postmodernist" (parody generated) texts of 10 pages each, inserting 100 errors per text, and giving it to 60 participants. That's 18,000 spot-checks across 180 papers. There are jigs that can make this easier, but it's not a matter of throwing things into a scantron. Still, that's what RAs are for. The acknowledgments section seems light, though.
  • Participants were offered 10 cents per error compensation. It's unclear if the students knew the quality of the papers or total number of errors available to catch. If they did know, that gives a cap of 30 dollars. If they didn't, a more plausible range is closer to 10 dollars. College students will do a lot for beer money, but homework?
  • According to the data supplied to Hyndman, only 16 / 60 made more than Massachusetts current minimum wage, according to self-reported time series.
  • Zero participants dropped out, or gave no or token effort on the last paper or on any paper.
  • The paper describes recruitment as "In MIT’s newspaper and on bulletin boards, we placed an ad looking for “native English speakers to help us proofread papers by other students to evaluate writing skills.”" There are two papers I could find that could fit that criteria: the student-run The Tech and the official Tech Talk. I've downloaded 1998-2002's full archives from both sources, and run them through an OCR toolkit. I can find other Ariely outreach in Tech Talk, including "Subjects needed for experiment in decision making, $10/hour. Contact: ariely@mit.edu." I can't find anything matching the study procedure. There may be other, unarchived sources.

DataColada is going to focus on the data manipulation, because the proof there is undeniable and they don't need to make a 90% bet.

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