The trouble is that researchers and universities also act like marketers, and also even different factions within a single company will act like marketers to self-promote their work in order to compete for a better bonus or promotion or something.<p>Since regression type analyses are so amenable to this, and it&#x27;s so easy to data mine for arbitrary thresholds of success, like &quot;significance&quot; levels, the problem tends to spiral out of control.<p>I wish it was just confined to advertisers and SEO stuff. But the ugly truth is that if you peel back the layers in many organizations that claim to do &quot;quantitative&quot; or &quot;data-driven&quot; business, it&#x27;s just more of this same poor statistical hygiene.