My takeaway from his course is that it is simply hard to do science properly. He had the example of a drunk bum showing up for a psychological experiment otherw

My takeaway from his course is that it is simply hard to do science properly. He had the example of a drunk bum showing up for a psychological experiment otherwise primarily run with students, completely spoiling the results. The first impulse is to dismiss the data point as an outlier, but then he pauses and considers that if the bum would have supported his hypothesis, he would probably have decided differently. I would imagine there are many such cases in social sciences, that are not really clear cut. Also in general, people can not reliably the fallacies they are prone to, so it is a constant uphill struggle. Maybe immediately crying "fraud" is not always appropriate.