Agreed, but maybe you have to assume that the scientist knows very little about coding for data science, which is effectively what we're talking about here. I

Agreed, but maybe you have to assume that the scientist knows very little about coding for data science, which is effectively what we're talking about here. I think a major contributing factor to problems like this is people going into the soft/social sciences being more likely to be math/stats AND programming averse. Meanwhile, all sciences continue their long term trend towards applied math via programming. This leads to people using the math/stats via code without understanding very well what it is they are doing, and, naturally, the end result is lots and lots of mistakes.