Let me tell you about the time I faked data "for science".
My Wildlife Management class was assigned to survey the number of squirrels and squirrel nests in a plot of woods on the university campus. It was a wild area of many acres beside the remote free parking lot. A perfect place for hiding corpses, if someone is into that sort of thing.
The class divided into groups. Every group was free to choose their methods of survey, and we were to extrapolate from our observations to the entire area and write up a report. The group I was in decided on our method and chose a time and date to meet.
At the designated hour, we met and headed off into the woods with our notebooks. Then things fell apart.
A little backstory. I spent nearly all my time in the woods-- when I wasn't forced to be somewhere else. Rain, snow, heat, whatever. And, among friends and family, I am envied as the person mosquitos ignore. I taste bad to them or something, and many times I am completely unbothered while the people with me are covered with ravenous mosquitos and going insane from the misery.
The mosquitos in those woods that day had never heard that I should be ignored. My group fled the woods without documenting a single squirrel or squirrel nest. We were all covered in huge, white welts when we had run far enough from the trees to stop and compare. It was a new (unpleasant) experience for me. Later I found out all the other groups had done the same.
Yet, we all turned in "reports", and the "reports" were all similar enough to look like human error or like different methods of extrapolation could explain them.
Science is real and can be trusted. Humans can't be trusted to do real science when there's an incentive to make stuff up. Whether it's a bias, money, or a swarm of giant hungry mosquitos.
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