Psychological Statistics

It never occurred to me until today to write a post about why faking data is bad. However, I noticed an interesting exchange on Andrew Gelman's blog (see the comments on this post about Marc Hauser). One commenter argued that it was not clear that Hauser had faked his data (though I don't think that plausible given the results of the investigations and Hauser's dismissal from Harvard), and - more interestingly - that any data fraud was not serious because his supposedly fraudulent work has been replicated. This argument is in my opinion deeply flawed.

Andrew Gelman's response was:

To a statistician, the data are substance, not form. I would generalize that to all of science.