[mattkrause]

The moral of that story, IMO, is not "don't do experiments with rodents" or even "bio/psych is nonsense."

Instead, the point is that a good scientist has to aggressively consider possible explanations for your data and possible experimental confounds. This is much, much harder when studying subjects that have some agency of their own, like rats or humans.

[handrous]

It gets even worse outside of science. I'm sure most people who've been in the business world long have noticed that attempts to eliminate confounding factors when drawing conclusions are rarely even attempted unless the results contradict what the highest-on-the-org-chart interested party wants it to be (and even then, they're usually just ignored rather than any attack on their validity actually being made).

For all the attempts to measure stuff and be "scientific", businesses mostly run on gut feelings, even when they're doing "experiments" or "collecting data in order to make informed decisions" or whatever. Often it's really easy to spot problems with these processes, but no-one cares as long as the PowerPoint slides say what they want them to say and pretend to be backed by data.

[revolvingocelot]

>but no-one cares as long as the PowerPoint slides say what they want them to say and pretend to be backed by data

I've seen this described as "decision-based evidence-making".