Nate Breznau

But this happens.

If you think about the pharmaceutical industry, there's a lot of industries where you can make a lot of money as a scientist.

And so you would be incentivized to show certain results.

And, you know, there are other things like in science, it's a competition.

We're competing for jobs and grant money and things like that.

And in this competition, people could be motivated to do things that are not so scientific.

Like they come to some findings and then they do some little nudging or in really practical

people who are really bad actors might do a little fudging where they even like fake some data.

We do have scandals, you know, in science where people have just like straight up faked data.

But the more common is like the nudging where they, you know, there's tricks that people can kind of game the scientific system to make their results look a little bigger, a little shinier.

And those are called questionable research practices.

And they're a big problem.

Probably not.

I would think not, unless there was something about that study that could shape policy.

Because that's how ideology creeps into the process.

People have, turns out, scientists or human beings too.

And they have preferences and how they want the world to be and maybe a certain political party or certain policies.

And they may then consciously or even subconsciously be shaping their results.

Or they may even design studies in the first place to try to get certain results.

And so, yeah, this can creep into the process.