In business and politics, one of the great villains is the Yes Man. Countless books tell aspiring managers and leaders to be careful never to surround themselves with people who’ll just nod along with all their decisions, even the bad ones. Winston Churchill proclaimed that ‘the temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy. Thus the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’42 In science, publication bias makes Yes Men out of
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