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The most likely motive for this kind of fraud at this level is that the researchers “know” their hypothesis is correct and are just fixing some “mistakes” in th
by api 4y ago
The most likely motive for this kind of fraud at this level is that the researchers “know” their hypothesis is correct and are just fixing some “mistakes” in the data.
People do this all the time. In fact I’d say it’s the usual reaction when confronted with data contradicting one’s beliefs.
Scientists are supposed to learn to go past that but I wonder how many actually do, especially when there is both social and economic pressure to conform to a school of thought.
- xbar 4y agoI'm not sure that's the most likely motive.
- api 4y agoI think people want it to be a worse motive because they don’t want to admit how irrational and deliberately ignorant the vast majority of humans are most of the time. Looking at reality in an unbiased way and trying to draw rational conclusions is incredibly rare and requires effort. Ego and social group pressure are the enemy. Cackling evildoers are also very rare. Most evil is a product of how we normally behave and of normal social and economic incentives.
- plutonorm 4y agoIt takes a lot of life experience for someone with integrity to find out that other people are simple dopamine hunting monkeys who will flip flop to whatever social pressure is being applied at that present moment. We assume that others are like ourselves. And so the very people who are supposed to call out and fight the irrationality are actually blind to it. You do get people calling out the irrationality, but mostly they are driven by social incentives rather than duty and so they turn their eyes away from realms that are deemed pure. They have no incentive to look inwards to the scientific institutions because that way they lose the social esteem they gain from association with the scientific establishment.