Facebook has a strange sense of timing. This evening, it reminded me that I shared this image eleven years ago. No commentary, no hot take. Just a quiet repost. And honestly, I think it still works.

The flowchart is a tongue-in-cheek guide to something many of us recognise all too well. Criticism of research often says more about our preferences than about the quality of the evidence itself. Like all good satire, it exaggerates, but not by much. You still see these moves everywhere. A sudden obsession with external validity. The ritual call for “more research”. A selective respect for methods that depends entirely on whether the conclusions are convenient.

And yes, I am sure I have done this myself on this blog. Probably more than once. That is precisely why it remains useful. Being aware of confirmation bias does not make you immune to it, but it does give you a reason to be more critical of conclusions you happen to like.

What makes the image age so well is not that research debates have become more cynical, but that they haven’t really changed at all. The same reflexes keep resurfacing. Which is precisely why it remains useful. Not as a way to mock others, but as a mirror. It is worth asking, every now and then, whether we are engaging with evidence or just negotiating our discomfort with it.

Some things, it turns out, don’t expire.