<story><title>No funding for uncomfortable results</title><url>https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/12/07/no-funding-for-unwanted-news/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bjourne</author><text>In the 80:s, when I was a child, I was part of study about something called DAMP - Deficits in Attention Motor control and Perception). The DAMP diagnosis was roughly similar to ADHD, and kind of a precursor to it, invented by psychologists in the university in the city I grew up on. Back then, this Swedish university was very influential in the area of child psychology. Several renowned text books are written by researches on this university and so on. Luckily for me, I was part of the control group and not among the kids they thought suffered from DAMP.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, Gillberg the professor who led the study had promised all participating families total anonymity. But in the mid nineties, other researchers started to doubt the veracity of Gillberg&amp;#x27;s results. They thought they had found flaws in his methodology and wanted access to the raw material to double-check his results. Gillberg refused, realizing that anonymizing the data sufficiently so as to not leak any identifying details would be impossible.&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the other researchers went to court and got a court order demanding that Gillberg give up his data. At which point he destroyed all the raw data thereby completely removing any scientific underpinnings the DAMP diagnosis had. There is a lot more to be said about this controversy, but one thing is clear and that is that you shouldn&amp;#x27;t promise anonymity if you can&amp;#x27;t keep it.</text></comment>
<story><title>No funding for uncomfortable results</title><url>https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/12/07/no-funding-for-unwanted-news/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>new299</author><text>The statement in the original article linked is more interesting:&lt;p&gt;“In the few experiments a decade ago where publication would have been possible, academic journals refused to do so for reasons having nothing to do with the scientific quality of the work. Computer-science publications refused to publish re-identification experiments unless the paper also included a technological solution, notwithstanding assertions that publishing these experiments would inspire technological innovation to address the real-world problem. Health-policy publications refused to publish re-identification experiments related to health data from fear that reaction might make data sharing more difficult, despite assertions that because technology was fostering unprecedented levels of data-sharing, it was timely to scientifically re-examine data-sharing practices. Even my Weld example and related demographic analyses, despite making significant contributions to privacy regulations worldwide, were refused publication by more than 20 academic publications at the time.”&lt;p&gt;Personally if feels like the work was an important journalistic effort, but its scientific merit is less clear.</text></comment>