a scary science data story

Comments · 1.4K

• DA

  @danbolnick · 3 years ago · pinned

  As one of the people involved in this story, I want to complement you on how accurately and clearly you tell this story,

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• BR

  @Brascofarian · 3 years ago (edited)

  The irony of a spider scientist getting caught in a tangled web of deceit.

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• DO

  @donsample1002 · 3 years ago (edited)

  Isaac Asimov’s first non-science fiction novel, <i>A Whiff of Death</i> was a mystery about someone at a university being murdered for faking his data. It wasn’t very successful, and a lot of the non science reviewers criticized it for the motive, ‘cause that’s no reason to kill someone, and all the science reviewers were like “the little twerp got what was coming to him!”<br><br>[Edited to correct a typo.]

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• GA

  @Galakyllz · 1 year ago

  The fact that the equations were still in the spreadsheets kills me.

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• BE

  @Beastw1ck · 3 years ago

  This channel is my new hyperfixation. YouTube boosted &quot;string theory lied to us&quot; and now I&apos;m binging everything.

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• BU

  @BurgerFred1 · 3 years ago

  I feel the most for the spiders, who may never have their personalities or lack of personalities revealed to the arachnologist community

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• AN

  @antimatterhorn · 3 years ago (edited)

  academia most certainly rewards lying. like you said, confirmatory studies never get funded, but even worse than that, i&apos;ve been told by a Phys Rev D editor that they don&apos;t accept pure rebuttals - you have to write a whole new paper with new results and conclusions. and Pruitt&apos;s upward career trajectory proves the worst part of it - that had he simply published a few dozen papers showing weak results or no correlations, he&apos;d have gone nowhere, but showing novel correlations over and over and over was the key to his successful career. it&apos;s the reason why juvenile forms of known dinosaur species are given new species names, it&apos;s why nothing can be reproduced in behavioral psychology, it&apos;s the reason why Berkeley had to retract its discovery of element 118. being &quot;good at science&quot; is <b>not</b> how you become successful in the field. being &quot;right all the time&quot; is, even if you have to lie about it.<br><br>i wonder sometimes if the need to be right is responsible for the proliferation of so many competing and orthogonal statistical tests for novelty. in other words, not everyone is willing to fake their data, but they are willing to use a weak statistical test to prove their hypothesis.

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• SE

  @sehrgut42 · 3 years ago

  &quot;Why would they use a spreadsheet?&quot; Oh, I envy your entire field. Basically all of biology is done in Excel. They&apos;ve had to rename genes in contravention of the Principle of Priority, even, because Excel interpreted the original names as dates, and errors were getting into the published literature!

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• OK

  @okreylos · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlas3TOi_CQ&amp;t=1360">22:40</a> So they&apos;re <b>literally</b> doing peer review, and Pruitt is like &quot;NOOO! Don&apos;t do that! That&apos;s not how science works!&quot; It would be hilarious if it wasn&apos;t so maddening.

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• JM

  @jmrm01 · 3 years ago

  I can&apos;t express how much I love the lines, &quot;This was my &apos;Tiger King.&apos; This was my sourdough.&quot;

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• JO

  @JohnnyRottenest · 3 years ago

  “You would never open a spreadsheet.”<br><br>Tell me you’re a physicist without telling me you’re a physicist.

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• RO

  @RobertCampsall · 3 years ago

  How was Pruitt so prolific? &nbsp;Well, when you make up the data and don&apos;t actually do any experimentation or observation, it&apos;s AMAZING how quick it is to write a paper.

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