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> Most academics won’t falsify data — from a pragmatic perspective, that’s their career on the line In my experience, this is absolutely not true. I mostly only have first-hand observations in the economics, finance, and marketing disciplines. They left me EXTREMELY cynical about all academics. I have seen: 1) A well-known professor at an Ivy-league B-school openly talking to his class about how the NAR funded his latest study on the real estate market, which (of course) found that the market was not overvalued. This was 2007. The co-author on the paper was the dean of the B-school. He is no longer the dean, but only because he seems to have moved on to more lucrative consulting roles. 2) An older professor, who was one of the first to be in the group labeled "behavioral economics," when asked why he wasn't writing a book focused on more mainstream readers like some other such big names were at the time, STRONGLY hinting if you filled in the blanks although not outright saying that their ethics were questionable, they were all forming hypotheses that were useful for for consulting dollars and dredging up data to support it, and he was too old school (and too old) to be interested in playing that game. 3) A full cohort of marketing grad students (6-7) talking openly about how the system is messed up, and to get a job, you absolutely have to have a good dissertation with a strong results, but to avoid p-hacking allegations, you have to shoot in the dark. So you're left in this situation where you commit financial and career suicide if you DON'T make up data to support your thesis. It is not rare. It is an open secret. No one likes it. They hate it. But they also feel like they are the stupid idiot if they try to fight against it alone. It is how the system works. Only a true saint would accept data that actually does NOT support their hypothesis because it makes it unlikely they will get a job in a very competitive market. Some people do report non-findings, but they are rare. IMO, academic departments should specifically seek out graduates who were willing to report that and stuck by it. But that is not the way the world works. As another poster pointed out, we all like stories, and no significance means no good story to tell. |
1) Yeah, lots of people missed the crisis.
2) Yes, when funding doesn't come from the government it comes from industry. And then you need to find hypotheses that are interesting for industry.
3) That's how science works! You don't know what is true or false. You need to take your shot, see if the experiment you run works out. Sometimes you can be the smartest person in the world, put in the most work, but be in an area asking a question that doesn't pan out. It happens!
There are many ways to mitigate this. For example, you can often make experiments where it doesn't matter what the answer is. It's always interesting and publishable regardless of how the statistics work out. But, there is definitely luck involved, not just skill.
> Only a true saint would accept data that actually does NOT support their hypothesis because it makes it unlikely they will get a job in a very competitive market.
Only a scientist would! That's the game we play to discover new truths. And the vast majority of scientists do this.
Pretty much every idea that I have ever had is bad! Yet, somehow, I managed to get a PhD and now graduate many of my own PhD students. The trick is to learn to fail quickly, to ask the kinds of questions that are interesting no matter what, and to develop a sense for the types of questions that are more fertile.