Scientists sometimes call this practice ‘HARKing’ – HARK is an acronym for Hypothesising After Results Known. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with gathering data, poking around to find the patterns and then constructing a hypothesis. That’s all part of science. But you then have to get new data to test the hypothesis. Testing a hypothesis using the numbers that helped form the hypothesis in the first place is not OK.15
HARKING
