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by l5870uoo9y 67 days ago
> It could be either a fat-finger mistake when editing the Excel file or deliberate tampering to cover up real data that didn't tell the right story.

I can easily imagine after spending years or decades devoted to discovering a scientific breakthrough that some could be tempted to slightly alter the data. I believe there was some scandal about this a few years back with climate data. Fixing this is however something that AI would do fairly well.
3 comments
shevy-java 67 days ago
> AI would do fairly well

But AI can also hallucinate data. I am not sure this is an area for an automatic "AI is better than humans". Honesty is very important in science. There were even fake articles generated:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

And some other article I forgot, about arsene or some other ion being used in/for DNA or so. Turned out to be totally fabricated. Right now I don't remember the name of the article; was from some years ago.

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CWwdcdk7h 66 days ago
> some could be tempted to slightly alter the data

We even suspect the G. Mendel of altering his pea data, it is unlikely he got results so close to predicted ratios. So it is not "some", everyone is tempted to "clean up" data, be it by removing outliers or by duplicating "good" rows.

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devmor 67 days ago
I don’t believe fixing this is not something AI would do well.

Identifying it is something AI could do well, though. It’s very good at finding patterns - that’s kind of essential to how it works.

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