> "if you aren't comprehensively listing all the variables you're controlling for [...] then are you even really doing science?" Mate I think that's the point

> "if you aren't comprehensively listing all the variables you're controlling for [...] then are you even really doing science?" Mate I think that's the point of this whole thread that you're commenting in. And the tangential point to the article posted. Science isn't some binary thing. You can do poor science, and you can do great science. Some variables are hard or impossible to control for. Some fields make this simpler than others. I'd say that as we've continually endeavored with the sciences we're probably better at it now than we've ever been before. Synthetic conditions are absolutely critical to science. Typically, the more conditions you can specify in the experiment, the more reproducible it should be. Some of these are very difficult, and others in the thread have pointed out that some don't get labeled in the journals. If we ran such experiments in the wild, completely outside of control, then we can never know what we're really observing. By controlling the environmental variables your observations gain meaning.