I have no doubt that this is exactly what the author meant by "hide". That doesn't mean that it was a good idea.
If something is both Important and True, then the fact that the current data seems not to show the truth clearly might be thought a good reason to fix it. I mean, it's not like other people have to do this -- we can assume that everyone else's results are straight, so that means that there's something wrong with the data, and we can just fix that up so that it provides the correct correlation with what we already know is true...
I have no doubt that this is exactly what the author meant by "hide". That doesn't mean that it was a good idea.
If something is both Important and True, then the fact that the current data seems not to show the truth clearly might be thought a good reason to fix it. I mean, it's not like other people have to do this -- we can assume that everyone else's results are straight, so that means that there's something wrong with the data, and we can just fix that up so that it provides the correct correlation with what we already know is true...