3 ms·

When you've invested 4 or more years in Ph.D. research, there are powerful motivations to "find" results that support your thesis. Perhaps they are subconscious

• nonbel 9y ago
  The people who end up like that are the exact people who the PhD process is supposed to filter out...
  • opportune 9y ago
    No university or professor wants to be known for having any sizable number of their PhD candidates filtered out in the middle of the process. They'll delay poor performers for sure, but it just looks really bad when their candidates essentially fail out. Also consider that often it's not even the candidate's fault that their research went nowhere. Sometimes it's just due to chance that a particular path became a dead-end, but other times it's due to a professor obstinately pushing them to focus on something unproductive, perhaps well after it's almost entirely evident that the dead end is coming. It's a messed up system. I think the entire field of academic research needs a complete overhaul.
    • nonbel 9y ago
      Yes, the current system rewards that behavior and as a side effect rewards misunderstanding stats, etc. The people who have no qualms about "statistically significant" = "my theory is correct" (either due to maliciousness or ignorance) will graduate much sooner and be able to pump out more papers.
  • Klockan 9y ago
    Fake it till you make it significant (p < 0.05).
• fredophile 9y ago
  I think the real problem is that positive results are seen as better than negative results. Running a bunch of studies and showing that your theory doesn't work is just as much work as proving that it does work and is still a significant contribution.