Re:Has the lead-crime hypothesis been debunked?
by bjourne on Sunday August 01, 2021 @03:09AM
(#28024406)
The blog post author discusses that point and dismisses it. The lead-crime hypothesis is big in the world of Criminology and a statistical study finding no correlation between lead and crime most certainly would get published. For certain, there is a publication bias against negative results but it is not at all clear why it would apply in this case. Furthermore, statistical studies can take many man-years to conduct so why would the study authors throw away all that work rather than attempting to publish a negative result?
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Re:Has the lead-crime hypothesis been debunked?
by gus_massa on Sunday August 01, 2021 @07:28AM
(#28025513)
There is also the "faster than light neutrinos effect". It the result was true, the authors would get a Nobel price. If it was false, the authors would look like morons. So they decided to publish the FTL-neutrinos result informally, and as asking help, and with a lot of caveats. If it was true, they'd get their Nobel anyway. If false, they were just asking for help debugging a strange unexpected result.
In less interesting problems, the authors may decide to just not publish it.
In political areas, it's a risk that the far-right or far-left decides to support your preprint and later when you find the error claim that Big Something paid you to suppress the true. And the other side to claim that you are a far-other-side supporter.