It’s fair to say that fake data is a Boolean and a Rubicon, where once you do it once, at all, all is lost. Whereas there are varying degrees of misleading statistics versus clarifying statistics, and how one draws conclusions from those statistics, and one can engage in some amount of misleading without dooming the whole enterprise, so long as (as you note) the author is explicit and clear about what the data was and what tests were applied, so anyone reading can figure out what was actually found.
However, I think it’s not that hard for it to pass a threshold where it’s clearly fraud, although still a less harmful/dangerous fraud than fake data, if you accept that an opinion columnist cherry-picking examples is fraud (e.g. for it to be more fraudulent than that, especially if the opinion columnist isn’t assumed to be claiming that the examples are representative). And I like that example more the more I think about it, because that’s an example of where I expect to be softly defrauded in the sense that I assume that the examples and arguments are words written are soldiers chosen to make a point slash sell papers, rather than an attempt to create common knowledge and seek truth. If scientific papers are in the same reference class as that...
It’s fair to say that fake data is a Boolean and a Rubicon, where once you do it once, at all, all is lost. Whereas there are varying degrees of misleading statistics versus clarifying statistics, and how one draws conclusions from those statistics, and one can engage in some amount of misleading without dooming the whole enterprise, so long as (as you note) the author is explicit and clear about what the data was and what tests were applied, so anyone reading can figure out what was actually found.
However, I think it’s not that hard for it to pass a threshold where it’s clearly fraud, although still a less harmful/dangerous fraud than fake data, if you accept that an opinion columnist cherry-picking examples is fraud (e.g. for it to be more fraudulent than that, especially if the opinion columnist isn’t assumed to be claiming that the examples are representative). And I like that example more the more I think about it, because that’s an example of where I expect to be softly defrauded in the sense that I assume that the examples and arguments are words written are soldiers chosen to make a point slash sell papers, rather than an attempt to create common knowledge and seek truth. If scientific papers are in the same reference class as that...