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I'm confused as to what the actual issue was. What was the data for which Uzbekistan was the outlier and why?

• rao-v 25d ago
  The article suggests it's unreasonable numbers in the original Uzbekistan data source and that other datapoints may have been worse, the authors just didn't correctly execute their basic checks. "It turns out that Uzbekistan wasn’t even the biggest outlier, but that the version they had published had the axes cropped so you couldn’t see the outliers..."
  • tjwebbnorfolk 25d ago
    > had the axes cropped so you couldn’t see Almost sounds intentional... > This seemed indicative of a different issue, which is why we documented it in the comment. Yea, that different issue is fraud.
    • rdtsc 25d ago
      They are dancing around the accusation to help authors save face. Extreme incompetence (as in don’t let these people near 100 feet of any Excel spreadsheet level) could be another explanation but given the cropping issue it’s probably intentional
• madaxe_again 25d ago
  They don’t specify, but based on the period they’re talking about I’d put money on it being related to the cotton scandal, to pripiski - that is, the Soviet tendency to make up production figures. When glasnost happened in ‘88 the fiction collapsed, although not immediately - most cotton producers continued to bullshit about their numbers until the mid 90s, while the industry dwindled due to lack of water for irrigation and desertification.
  • beepbooptheory 25d ago
    This feels like it could be right, but then maybe its just interesting that there is exactly one outlier here like this, and not more?