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It was more of an insider-outsider thing for me.
We called it the "fudge factor".
In college chemistry and physics labs, whenever we had to do an experiment to measure a specific value, like say the concentration of sodium in a solution, and we already knew what the answer was supposed to be, we would fudge the hell out of our measurements. Throwing out or re-doing readings, sometimes even making them up. We justified it to ourselves as the lab equipment being finger-fucked into uselessness or whatever.
Then after I graduated I saw the same questionable methods, cherry-picking, failure to isolate, arbitrary assumptions in so many "scientific studies", usually buried several paragraphs in, if disclosed at all, by the unwitting "journalist". And I realized these "scientists" were the same people from my lab classes.
