[WhitneyLand]

Reading this article tbh causes second hand embarrassment. Ostensibly it’s targeting professional scientists using the brand of a prestigious journal, yet it has a vibe of explaining ethics and common sense to school kids. We’ve come to the point of having to explain to PhDs why cherry picking data is bad.

I’m not criticizing the article, rather bemoaning the fact that it’s needed. Of course the problem is not just with the much maligned social sciences, it’s physics and computer science too. The controversy around Microsoft’s topological qubits, a super complex topic, in part involved the most basic kind of this nonsense, something like including 4 samples of 20 measured in the paper iirc.

The community needs to get its shit together. The world we’re living in now, the post truth era, is the result of many factors but this is one of them. The loss of faith in science is partially a self-inflicted wound.