Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

You can see why scientists are tempted by overfitting. If you focus only on your own data and forget that your job is to make general statements about the world, a perfectly fitting model like graph 3C is very alluring: there are no uncertainties, no messy datapoints that evade the line you’ve drawn. The neatness alone is not what makes it so compelling, though: simply connecting the dots in the graph doesn’t require any scientific knowledge. But a paper that sounds as if you had come up with the specific shape of the line (your theory) before collecting the data? Now you’ve got the scientific world’s attention – and as we know, a major goal in science is to convince other scientists that your model, theory or study is worth taking seriously.