This paper questions the conventional wisdom that publication bias must result from the biased preferences of researchers. When readers only compare the number of positive and negative results of papers to make their decisions, even unbiased researchers will omit noisy null results and inflate...

This paper shows how a great philosopher, like Popper, can easily fall back to a common superstitious person. This paper also criticizes the general practice by statisticians to invent ad hoc method or manipulate data to suppress errors. Instead, this paper promotes the Xenophanes spirit of...