[YeGoblynQueenne]

Yes, of course many theoretical assumptions are broken- but that is because people who break them either ignore them completely, or deliberately voilate them in order to produce better-looking results. That is more common in industry where it's easier to pull the wool over the eys of senior colleagues, but it's not unheard of in academia, quite the contrary. Anyway, just because people do shoddy work and then report impressive results doesn't mean that we should accept poor methodology as if it was good.

In particular about the gaydar paper, the authors cook up their data to get good results and then use those results to claim that they have found evidence for an actual natural phenomenon (hormones influencing haircuts etc). That's just ...pseudoscience.

Is your google scholar link humour?

[ipsa]

You seem to be under the assumption that rebalancing is always bad or ignorant. That techniques, such as SMOTE, are only used to produce better-looking results and pull the wool over someones eyes. This is simply not true. Rebalancing is not shoddy, but accepted practice. It is certainly fair to question it, but not to draw the conclusion of fraud or shoddy science (without making you look pretty silly).

Again, I do not think rebalancing data justifies the conclusion that the authors were cooking up their data to report better results. Take a step back and assume good faith: could there be any other reasons to resample data, other than wanting to commit fraud?

The Google scholar links includes 10+ cited and peer-reviewed papers on the Yuri Geller drama.

I don't know enough about hormone theory to say anything against or for their conclusion, just focusing on showing that working automated gaydars that perform better than average/random guessing exist and have been scientifically demonstrated. I can agree with you on that the connection is spurious, without dropping my point that this controversial technology actually works (rebalanced or no).