alt Hacker NewsPeople are bad at reporting ANYTHING. Exercise, food, sex, grooming. Just ask a lawyer or anybody trying to get a story out of somebody.
This should be a fundamental understanding of anybody asking people anything. That scientists imagine there's some accurately-reporting population of subjects for their experiment is an example of the breathtaking naivete of scientists.
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>breathtaking naivete of scientists.
Crows are never whiter by washing.
You cannot dispense common sense through the educational system. Most career scientists are mediocre, and/or they are trying to survive in a rigged system.
Yeah the problem seem to be the researchers in the first place here, they're probably in a hurry to produce papers with supposedly real data.
Or maybe the researchers know all this from years working in this field, the problem might be from those simplifying the research for the public
Generalising, this is one of the lessons of the past ~2 centuries in which we've had for the first time reasonably objective analogic recording capabilities: photography, phonography, cinema, and the like. Until their emergence, human testimony across a wide range of phenomena was the only way to transmit information and, due to its low fidelity, low information density, unreliable interpretation and unreliable reproduction, that was at best only modestly reliable. A fantastic example of this (in numerous senses) is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros (1515), made from second-hand reports and sketches. On the one hand, it doesn't look true to life, but on the other, specific features of the animal are recorded with remarkable accuracy --- the segmentation of body plates, horns, toes, and aspect of the eyes for example. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros>.
And whilst analogue recordings have long been subject to manipulation, most of the time that took effort and expertise to accomplish smoothly, and independent recordings could be compared to detect edits and alterations. Following the emergence of digital image manipulation with photoshop, photographic "evidence" has become increasingly less evidentiary, with the spread of AI and smartphones, virtually all still and video images are at least somewhat processed, and with AI we can generate lifelike fabulations in realtime in multiple modes (still image, video, audio), including speech and background sounds, which can confound pretty much anyone, layperson or expert.
Which means that we're back in the realm of low-reliability fabulated reporting even or exspecially when mediated by our technologies, which had previously offered a solution to that problem.