I wish I remember the scientist who said "Happiness is finding an experiment that works and repeating it 600 times"-I may be paraphrasing it slightly but was always struck by its' bluntness and wry self-depreciation. Anyone with an idea let me know. I'm pretty sure it was someone in the biologic sciences and likely to be from the pre-molecular biology era.
This reminds me of Seymour Hersh. Here is a man-not long out of a beat in South Dakota who struck journalistic gold with the My Lai massacre story. For 35 he has tried to recreate that moment. Here is his recent story about Abu Gharib prison. This work has been deconstructed admirably here are sample quotes from that blog which references an O'Reilly interview
The campaign relies on two main points, neither of which is completely factual: 1) the Army did nothing, and 2) it's the superior's fault, not the troops. Point one is a lie. Point two is true, but there's a level where it becomes ludicrous. Given that point one is a lie, that level is low.
O'REILLY: All right. Well, the damage to the country obviously is just immeasurable. But reading your article in "The New Yorker." I just get the feeling that the Army, when they heard about it, started action almost immediately. It wasn't a cover-up situation. Or did I read your article wrong?
HERSH: This guy Taguba is brilliant. He could have made a living doing -- it's a credit to the Army that somebody with that kind of integrity would write this kind of -- it's 53-page report.
O'REILLY: OK, but Sanchez the commander put him in charge fairly quickly. They mobilized fairly quickly.
HERSH: No, look, I don't want to ruin your evening, but the fact of the matter is it was the third investigation. There had been two other investigations.
One of them was done by a major general who was involved in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it's very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison.
Hersh is lying: There were three investigations. And the two he acknowledges were conducted prior to the discovery of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. Immediately upon that discovery the Army launched a CID investigation into the allegations, it obtained the bulk of the evidence that led to the criminal charges in the case. Taguba's followed and was the fourth.
So the correct answer to O'Reilly's question was "Yes"
My point is not to decontruct Hersh-many have already done that but to point out the analagies between scientific bias and those in political science and journalism.
The difference is that in the hard sciences there are at least theoretically self correcting mechanisms
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