We’ll have to stick to non-self-aware animals:
I couldn’t help myself.
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I asked my doctor about this. His response:
“Weight loss with chocolate cake is not a good thing to do. However, if you are going to eat carbohydrates that raise your sugars like oatmeal or brown rice or starchy vegetables like sweet potato, then you should do it in the morning or at lunch and then the following day exercise before you eat breakfast again and that will help to burn fat. The sugar from the cake would affect your mood in a negative way.”
This was really so disappointing to me.
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But doctors, what do they know, right?
*starts baking*
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I can has cheezcake?
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I was so like, dude, you are no funsies.
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Surely this story was just intended to relaunch Bill Cosby’s career.
(Someone out there must know what I’m referring to.)
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Well, “scientific racism”/“race realism”/“race science” ain’t true:
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Well, it is a kind of race science. In that it’s a race to the bottom.
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Well this is disappointing:
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Indeed. Every once in a while something like this crops up to destroy our faith in the idea of the dispassionate scientist, only interested in the search for truth.
OTOH, now I have heard of the Luwians, which I hadn’t before. Only a couple of weeks ago, I first learned about the Late Bronze Age collapse, an astonishing 50-year period in which the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean were mostly destroyed.
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Perhaps this is why alot of what I read about the Luwians didn’t make sense.
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On the other hand, my intuition is that if you were to compare numbers, the percentage of scientists who did wrong is far lower than most occupations. It’s so rare that when it happens it gets a lot of coverage. But that’s just my (biased) opinion.
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But is it getting coverage because it’s rare, or is it getting coverage because it rarely gets called out?
I’ve mentioned it before, but my favourite example is Donna Haraway’s essay on the history of our understanding of primate social hierarchies, where the discovery of alpha females had to wait until there were enough women anthropologists in the field to notice – because the men’s previous assumptions on the “naturalness” of patriarchies prevented them from even bothering to look.
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The former, IMO. But I don’t know how it varies by field, and by country. Certainly we’ve become aware of more ethics violations in biology recently, for example, but I think it’s still a tiny proportion of the whole. And is neglecting part of science due to bias as bad as deliberately falsifying results?
I know this is not the same thing, but science does tend to self-correction, over the long haul, as more results come in. So effects of individual wrong-doing tend to right themselves, as your example shows. It takes a while sometimes, but the mere existence of embarrassing self-correction tends to enforce some self-restraint in those who might consider faking results, etc.
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I agree, but it’s also very hard to detect, since only someone well-versed in the same field is likely to notice, and the (usually correct) assumption is that scientists behave honourably.
The issue of blinkered assumptions is not the same as that of deliberate cheating or falsification, though.
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This is why it’s unfortunate that the top journals tend to shy away from articles that repeat experiments.
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It’s easier to commit fraud when the new discovery fits people’s preconceived assumptions, and when… the basic honesty of all involved is one of those assumptions.
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