Null results are "worthless" only in the sense that they're harder, if not impossible, to publish, and do less for your career. As a former neuroscientist, I h

Null results are "worthless" only in the sense that they're harder, if not impossible, to publish, and do less for your career. As a former neuroscientist, I had a unicorn data set of intracranial EEG data, and we'd spent so much time collecting it, that we were determined to find something. I left grad school before we found anything of interest. I believe my former prof eventually published something on it, but I analyzed the shit out of it, even knowing I was fishing, because so much time would have been lost to not use it. Fishing like this was one of the reasons I left. The pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of your career don't align often enough. To me, what's unusual is not that Wansink pushed to keep analyzing the data, but that he was called out for it. Everyone seemed to be doing it when I was in academia.