Skepticism Over Hype: Rethinking Reported Research
Retraction Watch interviews Aaron Brown about his book Wrong Number, a critique of how the media hypes influential studies that can be illogical or misleading; Brown argues for journalist skepticism and cautions against outsourcing scrutiny to statisticians, advocates for post-publication peer review and full transparency (data, code, holdout samples), and suggests independent testing institutions to vet ideas, with a nuanced view on when to disclose uncertain findings and how to treat government data to improve the reliability of published research.
