Comment by ngriffiths

I had two experiences at the polar opposites of the spectrum - one research team I worked on had very high standards and was comfortable being patient for material that had value. The other involved an approach that obviously stood no chance to be useful to anyone.

Some differences:

- The first one was in a space with more low hanging fruit

- The first one was after large effect sizes, not the kind where you can massage the statistical model

- The second one was a topic with far higher public interest

- The second one was primarily an analytic project, whereas the first one was primarily experimental

I feel like bad science lives in the middle of a spectrum - you have young fields/subfields with boring but impressive experimental breakthroughs, and on the other end you have highly political questions that have been argued to death without resolution. Bad science is about borrowing some of the strategies used in politics because all the important experiments have already been done.