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Kapitano: That's not a scientific sin as such – everyone's entitled to their opinion, no matter how stupid. It's only a problem when you manipulate data etc. in order to support your ideas and that falls under one of the other circles.

As for spammers, their comments get banished by my Spam Hammer.

LOL! Wow! Dante's inferno v2.0 I love it

Hilarious!

practiCalfMRI

What is written
What it means

It has long been known that…
I haven't bothered to look up the reference, but…

While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to these questions…
The experiment didn't work out, but I figured I could at least get a publication out of it.

The following conditioning system was chosen to study the problem.
The lab next door already had the equipment set up.

Three samples were chosen for detailed study.
The results on the others didn't make sense and were ignored.

Accidentally strained during mounting.
Dropped on the floor.

Handled with extreme care throughout the experiment.
Not dropped on the floor.

Typical results are shown.
The best results are shown, i.e. those that I expected.

Agreement with predicted curve: Excellent / Good / Satisfactory / Fair
Fair / Poor / Doubtful / Imaginary

Correct within an order of magnitude.
Wrong.

Of great theoretical and practical importance.
Interesting to me.

It is suggested that… it is believed that… it appears that…
I think that…

It is generally believed that…
A couple of other people think so too.

The most reliable results are those obtained by Jones.
Jones was my graduate student.

Fascinating work.
Work by a member of our group.

Of doubtful significance.
Work done by someone else.

It is clear that much additional work will be required before complete understanding.
I don't understand it.

A quantitative theory to account for these results has yet to be formulated.
I can't think of one and neither can anyone else.

Thanks are due to Glotz for assistance and Doe for valuable discussion.
Glotz did the work and Doe explained what it meant.

Extremely high purity.
Composition unknown, except for the exaggerated claims of the supplier.

Presumably/at longer times.
I didn't take the time to find out.

Trivial.
It took me a whole week to figure it out.

We have obtained…
We have borrowed, and we don't intend to return it.

Should it not be “fabrication” instead of “falsification”?

I am actually missing the “non-independence/circularity hell”, i.e. the place where those people reside who selected their data in a first step to guarantee that the subsequent statistical procedure will yield a significant (or at least exaggerated) result. Must be a very crowded place I think. Or can this be reduced to one of the other nine?

Love it! But now the demons are tormenting me, as I am chained to my desk trying to finish a chapter I promised my coauthor weeks ago…guilty, guilty, guilty! (in my defense, I have a day job and a family).

Nice one. Seem to be ever more people in your second circle these days. Though four made me laugh the most.

Talking of scientific hell, Solzhenitsyn in his novel (In) The First Circle puts scientists working for unsympathetic and capricious employers (in their case Comrade Stalin, who has locked them up in a special scientific prison camp) in the first circle. The analogy the foreword makes is with the ancient Greek and Arab philosophers in The Inferno, who Dante puts in the first circle, or Limbo. A bit about the book, and a story in homage to it, are on an old blogpost of mine here.

Brilliant! Being trapped in the seventh level of scientific hell, I feel so validated!

One aspect that might be missing is the circular arguement of winning grants and funding. You have a great idea for a novel experiment with important results, but unless you've already done the experiment with data, they won't believe it is possible and won't give you money to do the experiment. Of course, for the unethical who deny you funding then steel your idea and do it with their own internal funding, where do they go???

Returning to the seventh level, you might consider how to add the vicious publishing review cycle whose only goal appears to be to reject papers for publishing.

Again, brilliant!

Brilliant

However, I miss a circle for shoddy/sensationalist science journalism. Or do they get a hell all for themselves?

Err.. a hypothesis can be falsified by valid data, and that is perfectly good science. So your picture has a bad label at the bottom.

Why did you call the lowest circle of hell Falsification rather than e.g. lying or fraud or fabrication? I spent most of the article wondering what you had against Popper.

Ghost-writing was something I seriously considered, but I ran out of circles. Let's put it this way, it's not going to get you into Science Heaven.

Hi Skeptic, thanks for your kind words. This is Fregimus who translated your post to Russian. Perhaps, I should have asked for your permissions in advance, but I could not resist doing it immediately, now!

Those who sinned before reading Vul et al.'s Voodoo paper default to Limbo, I would suspect.

Anonymous, you've got it all wrong, I'm not a climate skeptic. Some clown tried to use this against climate science – I completely disagree.

Climate skeptics deserve to go to all 9 circles of science hell. Although many of them would get out of that sentence, on grounds of mental insufficiency.