This has been rattling around my head for a few days, because it's very typical, and quite silly.

It's amazing how little thought goes into the mechanics of the publication process sometimes.

Here we go.

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/01/13/deeply-unfair-first-author-of-newly-retracted-paper-on-weight-and-honesty-speaks-out/

(1) 'we were singled out for attention!'

You can often find the authors of retracted articles saying this if the original paper was counter-intuitive, or somehow deemed unbelievable, untowards, or morally offensive.

... yeah, you were. That's definitely what happened.

It's amazing to me that people publish papers that are read as:

"all black people are a bit dim"
"fat people are more dishonest, and that's cream cake mediated"
"women are crap at The Thing"

AND THEN ARE SURPRISED OR OFFENDED BY HEIGHTENED SCRUTINY.

**What did you think was going to happen?**

The same thing that happens when you say you can make pluripotent stem cells by acid washing, or you've invented a procedure which treats Cancer X or Serious Condition Y in a jiffy.

People are going to show up and kick the tyres.

"Oh, so I'm being picked on for challenging conventional wisdom! I thought science was the pursuit of truth regardless of context, without fear and favour of contemporary norms!"

The answer to this is always: YES, BUT.

Contemporary norms don't pass through an ethereal membrane from an alternate reality. They're in many ways built and informed by veridical information about the world. Go back and read some papers from pre 1970 on the psychopathology of homosexuals, e.g. Bergler

What changed? Yes, culture.

And also neuroscience, genetics, personality studies, sociocultural studies, cognitive models, etc. which are not somehow magically separate from it.

(2) 'why wasn't this picked up during peer review? we could have handled it!'

If you say this, you thinks publication is a game, not a process - something you 'win' under narrowly defined parameters, without reference to the external world unless it interferes with 'the rules'.

What this often means is 'if only you'd brought this up before, I could have glibly explained it away at the time, and then won the game - and then i wouldn't be here, being embarrassed by all you arseholes with your annoying empirical and statistical criticisms!'

Huge floods of good papers are published every day that have zero public profile.
Huge floods of deeply shithouse papers are published every day that have zero public profile.

But you push the button on something that garners widespread attention, and the experience changes.

So many contrarians want to reserve the right to make controversial statements, and then retain immunity from criticism because it's breaking some norm created by all the stuff that no-one reads carefully.

The feelings of hurt surprise they manage to produce are always tiresome.

Anyway, I hope that was cogent, I've been typing it between separate calls and meetings for a while.