No.  That completely misrepresents the problem.<p>tl;dr A false technique can be described and it can be hard or impossible to detect the technique is flawed by using it<p>For example the paper at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;222500" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;222500</a>  describes a method of using the stationary bootstrap to eliminate data snooping bias in studies of &quot;technical analysis&quot; in finance.<p>Published in the Journal of Finance in 1999 at the time I worked with it in 2010 it had been cited over 500 times.<p>The proof in the paper is inscrutable.  I could find no one who could explain or verify the proofs at my institution.<p>I attempted to reproduce the results in the paper which is where the problems started.  The authors did not give enough information to do this in all cases, but in some cases I was able to reconstruct the algorithms.<p>They did not perform as described.  Of the five algorithms I could reproduce (from memory) one of them worked roughly as described and two others were not completely hopeless.<p>Looking more closely I realised that the original authors completely disregarded important factors in the implementation of the techniques described by the algorithms.  Transaction costs.  Allowing for transaction costs (a difficult but not impossible task) the effects noticed by the authors disappeared completely.<p>Looking even closer I examined the assumptions behind &quot;White&#x27;s Reality Check&quot; that the paper relied on the Stationary Bootstrap by  Politis and Romano from 1994.  But financial returns are not stationary.  Not at all.<p>So dodgy logic, misuse of statistics, irreproducible   experiments, ignoring important aspects of the data and I suspect wishful thinking add up to a paper that is comprehensively false.  Cited hundreds of times and used many times to verify other results.<p>taking a huge risk here is where my research is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourarchive.otago.ac.nz&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;handle&#x2F;10523&#x2F;4346&#x2F;TureiStantonWorikM2013MCom.pdf?sequence=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourarchive.otago.ac.nz&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;handle&#x2F;10523&#x2F;4346&#x2F;T...</a>  Section 5.12.1 &quot;Bootstrapping and Other False Discoveries&quot;