Why do people (here and elsewhere) vilify authors with anomalies in their data? Obviously, there are some cases that show clear fraud. But people here seem to vilify even those whose data is just "weird." In the other sciences like chemistry and physics, people have retracted papers because their data were (shown/proven by others to be) weird. Yet, these people aren't vilified. Some in fact go on to win Nobel prizes. The social sciences is wonky. Data is weird. LN likes to look at last digits, which should be random, but in one or two cases, it's bound to be non-randomly distributed. Many of these cases, there is no fraud (at least not until it's proven). It's just how it is. Other fields accept retractions as normal (unless, again, it's fraud). But not CB. We automatically believe DA to be a fraud when data is just plain weird. Grow up.The probability that the insurance data is “real” and not fabricated is basically nil. The only question is who is responsible. And if we ever get to the bottom of it, they deserve to be vilified.
As for other fields not vilifying fakers and frauds. The people who flecked with photoshop to publish Alzheimer’s papers are being vilified. Anil Potti, vilified. The guy who faked the contact hypothesis is totally vilified. There are whole fields in electrical engineering where no one will cite Chinese papers for fear the data are fake. There’s a difference between weird data and fraud and other fields definitely anathematize frauds.Read what I said. I said if there's fraud, then yes vilify them. But if there are just weird data, that's not (necessarily) fraud and the researchers should not be vilified.
I just assume a lot of the criticism here is people bandwagoning on who haven’t really looked at the data and don’t know how