Re:'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat
by dc-programmer on Monday September 05, 2022 @11:17AM
(#32725261)
Personally this is one of the reasons I chose to go into software instead of statistics when I was a young math major. The idea that you could make a small mistake that invalidates all your work and you might not even know it until much later or even never always made me uncomfortable. With software I can write tests till my neuroticism has been placated
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Re:'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat
by jefftk on Monday September 05, 2022 @12:29PM
(#32726157)
If all the programmers who write tests go into industry and none of them go into academia, then the state of software in academia will be... oh, I see, the status quo.
Re:'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat
by pca006132 on Monday September 05, 2022 @01:13PM
(#32726649)
No, they do write tests, just
1. Include the ones that passed and discard those that failed. 2. Run the tests several times and report only the best result. 3. Keep some of the details secret (data, some weird parameters, or maybe the whole repository), tweak something, run again, get some nice figures and publish a new paper.
Re:'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat
by WalterBright on Monday September 05, 2022 @02:03PM
(#32727209)
Caltech has Millikan's (oil drop experiment demonstrating quantization of charge) notebooks. He repeated the experiment until the data fit his theory.
Fortunately, he turned out to be right.