There’s something here about how mistakes get treated, though I don’t know if I can articulate it well at the moment.
Like, if I quote two or three sentences of a report, did I pick a reasonable piece of the concluding paragraph or did I cherry pick the best possible sentences for my argument? If one column got left out of the dataset and it turned out that column made my case weaker, was that a data parsing mishap or a deliberate attempt to suppress information?
People often remember best the parts of information that agree with them. (That’s an assertion I don’t have citations for at the moment, but I think it’s true.) So a little bit of that kind of thing doesn’t mean they’re doing it deliberately. But if I pick up on a lot of it, more than usual, then I get more suspicious.
There’s something here about how mistakes get treated, though I don’t know if I can articulate it well at the moment.
Like, if I quote two or three sentences of a report, did I pick a reasonable piece of the concluding paragraph or did I cherry pick the best possible sentences for my argument? If one column got left out of the dataset and it turned out that column made my case weaker, was that a data parsing mishap or a deliberate attempt to suppress information?
People often remember best the parts of information that agree with them. (That’s an assertion I don’t have citations for at the moment, but I think it’s true.) So a little bit of that kind of thing doesn’t mean they’re doing it deliberately. But if I pick up on a lot of it, more than usual, then I get more suspicious.