自私的“微调”损害科学

“tweaks” hurt science Seemingly innocuous research decisions can harm scientific credibility, argue a pair of social scientists Shankar Venkataraman THE CREDIBILITY CRISIS IN SCIENCE | When a singer tweaks a musical arrangement to make a song sound better or a mechanic tweaks an engine to improve its performance, the word “tweak” denotes a small or innocuous change to a creative work or system to improve its output. In sharp contrast, the central argument in The Credibility Crisis in Science, by social scientists Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, is that when scientists tweak their models for self-serving reasons, these changes are neither innocuous nor do they improve science. …