Endless choices offer endless opportunities for scientists who begin their analysis without a clear idea of what they’re looking for. But as should now be clear, more analyses mean more chances for false-positive results. As the data scientists Tal Yarkoni and Jake Westfall explain, ‘The more flexible a[n] … investigator is willing to be – that is, the wider the range of patterns they are willing to ‘see’ in the data – the greater the risk of hallucinating a pattern that is not there at all.’71
