For what it's worth I see the same thing in enterprise app development.
We've been doing a lot of data visualization and it often happens that someone comes to me with a thinly veiled task that's really to prove this or that person/process is at fault for delaying a project or something.
Sometimes though the numbers either don't support their opinion or even show a result they don't like and so inevitably they have me massage the graphs and filters until they see a result that looks how they want it to and that's what gets presented at various meetings and email chains.
The information at that point isn't wrong per se, just taken out of context and shown in a persuasive (read: propaganda) rather than informative way.
I've seen something similar in my field - industrial automation and testing. When a company wants to upgrade their testers, the testers we create are usually much more precise when compared to something created 20-30 years earlier. Often we have to modify our testers to match the results generated by these old, barely working testers.These companies request us to do it simply because otherwise they would need to change all of its literature, and explain to their customers why the products have slightly different specs then what they delivered last quarter.
Unfortunately, Our society is built on rotten foundations.
Yeah, I used to do a lot of financial reporting for a medical group. It eventually got to the point that after the second "those numbers don't look right" that I started asking what they wanted the numbers to show so I didn't waste any more of my time.
We've been doing a lot of data visualization and it often happens that someone comes to me with a thinly veiled task that's really to prove this or that person/process is at fault for delaying a project or something.
Sometimes though the numbers either don't support their opinion or even show a result they don't like and so inevitably they have me massage the graphs and filters until they see a result that looks how they want it to and that's what gets presented at various meetings and email chains.
The information at that point isn't wrong per se, just taken out of context and shown in a persuasive (read: propaganda) rather than informative way.