Science fraud incentives

If Kanazawa did his Kanazawa thing, and the power pose people did their power-pose thing, and so forth and so on, I’d say, Fine, I can see how these things were worth a shot. But when statistical design analysis shows that this research is impossible, or when replication failures show that published conclusions were mistaken, then damn right I expect you to move forward, not keep doing the same thing over and over, and insisting you were right all along. Cos that ain’t science. Or, I should say, it’s a really really inefficient way to do science, for individual researchers to devote their careers to dead ends, just cos they refuse to admit error.

We learn from our mistakes, but only if we recognize that they are mistakes. Debugging is a collaborative process. If you approve some code and I find a bug in it, I’m not an adversary, I’m a collaborator. If you try to paint me as an “adversary” in order to avoid having to correct the bug, that’s your problem.

See distill.pub/2017/research-debt/

• Discredited famous studies
• Book: How to Lie with Statistics
• Book: Standard Deviations

• RCTs
• Eugenics