this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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No data is better than bad data.
Nah, bad data is valuable to science because you learned what you did had a confounding variable.
Maybe not exactly what it was, but investigating and identifying it is literally the scientific method.
Even early psych experiments like Standford Prison, completely useless data, but why it was useless lead to modern rules about experiments to control for all the ways Zimbardo fucked up.
But when talking about funding and/or employment...
A good scientist can defend their position with any data. The complete absence of any data would be when you're fucked.
It's not even just in science, metrics are a thing almost everywhere, and that's just statistical analysis done by people who never heard those two words put together. It's trivial to exploit the metrics to make things look better, but what's better is to explain why the problem is the metrics.
If you're less than ethical you could do that even if you've not been doing your job.
Sorry, I maintain that processing data that is full of (known) systematic problems or data that is known to be insufficiently sensitive to detect the goal is a drain on limited resources.
You're exactly right.