4 ms·
Genuine curiosity here. What's wrong with making an experiment, and when the results clearly contradict your initial assumptions (so much that the opposite is c
by setzer22 9y ago
Genuine curiosity here. What's wrong with making an experiment, and when the results clearly contradict your initial assumptions (so much that the opposite is confirmed) then publishing the found results?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- xaa 9y agoBecause a very common type of hypothesis is along the lines of "gene X is important in disease Y" or "priming people with words will affect psychological outcome Z". The opposite hypothesis is the null hypothesis which is "gene X is NOT important in disease Y" or "priming DOESN'T affect outcome Z". Since we assume that most interventions will not affect most outcomes, these are much less surprising and interesting results. They are seen as "water is wet" type of findings and are thus hard to publish because no one is interested. Now if your hypothesis is something like "X will cause Y to go up" and you actually find it causes Y to go down, that IS publishable. It is only when X has no effect on Y that you will have problems.
- BeetleB 9y agoIf you mean in the context of what I was saying: Nothing wrong. But if you found some interesting correlations, you should not publish it - you should predeclare the hypothesis and what you'll look for, collect more data, and then publish if the new data matches the hypothesis. This is assuming predeclaring ever becomes the norm.