One night in Uzbekistan: Why was this one data point so influential?
61 points by paulpauper 2 days ago | 7 comments
MarkusQ 4 hours ago
We need something akin to the international geophysical year, but for data integrity. Make it an interdisciplinary priority to clean house and root out papers that are hanging by a thread of included / excluded outliers, biased samples, and outright fraud. It would be humbling, but we'd be in much better shape afterwards.
replytootie 2 hours ago
I'm confused as to what the actual issue was. What was the data for which Uzbekistan was the outlier and why?
replyrao-v 2 hours ago
The article suggests it's unreasonable numbers in the original Uzbekistan data source and that other datapoints may have been worse, the authors just didn't correctly execute their basic checks.
reply"It turns out that Uzbekistan wasn’t even the biggest outlier, but that the version they had published had the axes cropped so you couldn’t see the outliers..."
tjwebbnorfolk 11 minutes ago
> had the axes cropped so you couldn’t see
replyAlmost sounds intentional...
> This seemed indicative of a different issue, which is why we documented it in the comment.
Yea, that different issue is fraud.
And how useful potentially AI could be to spot those (even if retrospectively)