[charliesharding]

Really sad to see and feels like it's becoming more common (maybe just because I'm paying closer attention). If it fits the narrative, accept first, retract later. It would be interesting to see view statistics on the original article vs the retraction.

[astine]

It's not just narrative fitting. There is also a strong bias towards publishing results that seem surprising because that gets more readers. Of course, that also biases toward wrong results because wrong results are likely to be surprising.

[gumby]

"wrong results are [more likely] to be surprising".

This case is interesting because there's a large population who would find these (unproven as it turns out) results confirmatory rather than unexpected.

In the end they were neither.

[twy123456]

Narrative fitting and surprise bias are largely orthogonal biases. Both are at work in this case. In the western press it is trendy to paint religion in a negative light, which is the narrative the paper reinforces. Imagine a bogus paper painting in an unfavorable light one of the western virtuous identities: not white, not religious, not male, not hetero. For example, "The Negative Association between Atheism and Children’s Altruism across the World". Or "The Negative Association between Homosexual Parents and Children’s Altruism across the World". Such papers will never be covered by over 80 media outlets without questioning, in spite of being surprising with respect of the narrative.

[hos234]

It's not sad, it's great.

The history of science is full of drama where most issues took multiple generations to resolve. It's easy to forget, in those interim periods, people would build all kinds of castles on total BS all the time that cost society in so many ways.

Today stuff gets resolved faster and that's a good thing. People, qualified or not, who get carried away by hype or bias look foolish much much faster. And thanks to how hard it is to erase mistakes from the internet good luck rebuilding lost cred.

[scollet]

This is a very reassuring viewpoint. I think the onus of acceptance relies on each individual perception and how they can relate to such facts. I will disagree on your usage of 'foolish' because I don't think it's in anyone's best interest to declare foolishness, but to paint a wholistic, optimistic picture of a realistic future. It is my opinion to embrace misconceptions about past mistakes that can have astounding detrimental effects and not to look down, but to unabashedly represent a truth and allow others to accept it.