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The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
resistant writes "As the evocative title from Wired magazine implies, Kevin Dunbar of the University of Toronto has taken an in-depth and fascinating look at scientific error, the scientists who cope with it, and sometimes transcend it to find new lines of inquiry. From the article: 'Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."'"
Disclaimer: I am an academic research associate
Here's a quote from the article:
"But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data...The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y."
The dirty little secret is that the Y is not always unexpected, just too politically incorrect and dangerous to be released to the public. For example, my team at Rutgers just completed a comprehensive experiment measuring a variety of factors including intelligence and genetic makeup(read: race). What we discovered would have caused a political shitstorm orders of magnitude worse than that of Don Imus when he referred to our Women's basket ball team as "Nappy-headed Ho's", so we declared it unsucessful and quietly buried it.
We tried, we really did. We developed formulae which would account for environmental/nutrure factors. We were very forgiving with the fairness of our methods, and yet the numbers still added up in a way that was unflattering to our hypotheses.
Oh, well. Maybe they'll finally figure it out when a monkey-ass coon tries to blow up a plane and ends up lighting his nuts on fire. Wait, what? HA HA! Oh, man! What a Gorilla!
The problem is you generally do not get money to simply study X.
You get money to show that X affects Y in manner Z. If X doesn't affect Y in manner Z they pull your funding, give you a failing grade, or otherwise find ways to punish the results.
They do this over and over again and then wonder why researches fake data, toss good data out and re-do the study looking for results they want instead of what is.
Want to do a drug study that says Drug A is safe to fight cancer? Got results that indicate an increase risk of heart attack? Have the study declared flawed, re-do the study with a slightly different mix of subjects and repeat. With luck your new study shows the heart attack risk is below the error threshold of your study and you can ignore it. Release your drug, make your millions and, after you leave have the real-world implicates show up on the 5 o'clock news.
no evidence of massaged or ignored data
Well, not really. Quoting from the article you linked, they used tree rings when it supported AGW and ignore them when it didn't:
The "trick" that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring data which was misleading, Mann explained.
Sometimes the data didn't line up as perfectly as scientists wanted.