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Comment by eblume | Hacker News Reader

I hope that the lesson learned here isn't to never make mistakes, or worse still, that if you do make a mistake you need to cover it up.

There is also a third, even more frightening potential lesson here - if you arrive at a surprising result, assume you are incorrect and sweep it under the rug.

Hopefully that's not what people will take from this. Hopefully all they will take from it is to always report new science with a great deal of qualification and skepticism. It won't make headlines as well, but I think we've seen time and time again that the short and hyperactive media news cycle can't handle modern science.

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I was listening to an interview on fresh air with baseball catcher Brad Ausmus today. He said something I thought was pretty insightful, and relevant to the science and people's reactions towards failure:

DAVIES: And when somebody could take a little berating what would you berate them about?

Mr. AUSMUS: Usually when I was berating someone it was because they were pitching what I would call scared. They were trying to avoid contact or they were afraid that the hitter was going to hit the ball. In sports in general you can't be afraid of failure, but in baseball there's so much failure you really can't be afraid of it. So the only time I would berate a pitcher or get on a pitcher would be when I felt like they were pitching scared on the mound and that they were trying to avoid contact because they were afraid of what was going to happen. So unless you were doing that like I said I general rule was to walk away with them feeling they could get out of that situation.

I hope popular and public reaction to scientific failure doesn't give way to "researching scared".

You would be surprised (or shocked, or perhaps just sadly resigned) to how often people "sweep things under the rug" in academic biology. Do your results conflict with some keystone experiment performed 10 years ago by famous people? Too bad for you, something must be wrong with your experiment.

Even better, my personal favorite is the "well, we think this is a real result...but we don't want to be the people to question the status quo. Ignore it".

I think a potential lesson, maybe a good one, is to try very hard to have all your collaborators on board with a very surprising result before you publish.

Exactly, I think the team acted quite correctly, and its a shame that this is happening.

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