Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. The following quotes of his apply to this subject.
If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
S)cience is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected
Reflecting on then current scandals in psychology arising from non-replicable research, E. Wagenmakers, a prominent social psychologist, blamed many of the problems on “data torture”. Wagenmakers attributed many data torture problems on ex post selection of methods. In today’s post, I’ll show an extraordinary example of data torture in the PAGES2K Australasian reconstruction.
Wagenmakers on Data Torture
Two accessible Wagenmakers’ articles on data torture are An Agenda for Purely Confirmatory Research pdf and a Year of Horrors pdf.
In the first article, Wagenmakers observed that psychologists did not define their statistical methods before examining the data, creating a temptation to tune the results to obtain a “desired result”:
we discuss an uncomfortable fact that threatens the core of psychology’s academic enterprise: almost without exception, psychologists do not commit themselves to a method of data analysis before they see the actual data. It then becomes tempting to fine tune the…
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