Rachel Cunliffe shares this delight:

Had the CNN team used an integrated statistical analysis and display system such as R Markdown, nobody would’ve needed to type in the numbers by hand, and the above embarrassment never would’ve occurred.

And CNN should be embarrassed about this: it’s much worse than a simple typo, as it indicates they don’t have control over their data. Just like those Rasmussen pollsters whose numbers add up to 108%. I sure wouldn’t hire them to do a poll for me!

I was going to follow this up by saying that Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and Richard Tol should learn about R Markdown—but maybe that sort of software would not be so useful to them. Without the possibility of transposing or losing entire columns of numbers, they might have a lot more difficulty finding attention-grabbing claims to publish.

Ummm . . . I better clarify this. I’m not saying that Reinhart, Rogoff, and Tol did their data errors on purpose. What I’m saying is that their cut-and-paste style of data processing enabled them to make errors which resulted in dramatic claims which were published in leading journals of economics. Had they done smooth analyses of the R Markdown variety (actually, I don’t know if R Markdown was available back in 2009 or whenever they all did their work, but you get my drift), it wouldn’t have been so easy for them to get such strong results, and maybe they would’ve been a bit less certain about their claims, which in turn would’ve been a bit less publishable.

To put it another way, sloppy data handling gives researchers yet another “degree of freedom” (to use Uri Simonsohn’s term) and biases claims to be more dramatic. Think about it. There are three options:

1. If you make no data errors, fine.

2. If you make an inadvertent data error that works against your favored hypothesis, you look at the data more carefully and you find the error, going back to the correct dataset.

3. But if you make an inadvertent data error that supports your favored hypothesis (as happened to Reinhart, Rogoff, and Tol), you have no particular motivation to check, and you just go for it.

Put these together and you get a systematic bias in favor of your hypothesis.

Science is degraded by looseness in data handling, just as it is degraded by looseness in thinking. This is one reason that I agree with Dean Baker that the Excel spreadsheet error was worth talking about and was indeed part of the bigger picture.

Reproducible research is higher-quality research.

P.S. Some commenters write that, even with Markdown or some sort of integrated data-analysis and presentation program, data errors can still arise. Sure. I’ll agree with that. But I think the three errors discussed above are all examples of cases where an interruption in the data flow caused the problem, with the clearest example being the CNN poll, where, I can only assume, the numbers were calculated using one computer program, then someone read the numbers off a screen or a sheet of paper and typed them into another computer program to create the display. This would not have happened using an integrated environment.

The post What does CNN have in common with Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, and Richard Tol: They all made foolish, embarrassing errors that would never have happened had they been using R Markdown appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.