1 In 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked To Commit Scientific Fraud (acsh.org)

As the saying goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." We know that's true because statisticians themselves just said so. From a report: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often ask statisticians to make "inappropriate requests." And by "inappropriate," the authors aren't referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they're referring to requests for unscrupulous data manipulation or even fraud. The authors surveyed 522 consulting biostatisticians and received sufficient responses from 390. Then, they constructed a table that ranks requests by level of inappropriateness. For instance, at the very top is "falsify the statistical significance to support a desired result," which is outright fraud. At the bottom is "do not show plot because it did not show as strong an effect as you had hoped," which is only slightly naughty.

Comments

The scientific method

[petes_PoV]

And when the experiment is repeated - many times, by different teams in different labs using different statistical techniques to analyse the results, the truth will come out.

But if an experiment is only performed once, never scrutinised, never checked, never tested then there can be little or no confidence in its conclusions.

Re:Only 1 in 4?

[hey!]

This study is talking about biostatisticians. Most of those guys are bound to be working for pharmaceutical companies.

As for the social science Brian Wansink was recently stripped of his Cornell professorship when he and is lab were caught doing extensive "p-hacking". Interestingly, the research they were doing was essentially psychological in nature, but Wansink has no academic training in psychology; he has a BA in business administration, an MA in journalism and a PhD in marketing, and his lab was operated out of Cornell's business school.

Re:want your next grant?

[ClickOnThis]

Uh, what???

[...wait, let's read this again...]

UH, WHAT???