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Basically, you are talking about "engineering" instead of "science". Not that I'm trying to start a long discussion about definitions or mutual exclusivity, but
by bo1024 9y ago
Basically, you are talking about "engineering" instead of "science". Not that I'm trying to start a long discussion about definitions or mutual exclusivity, but these kind of "results" are clearly about building something new and showing it works, not proposing a hypothesis about how the natural world works and testing that hypothesis.
- nonbel 9y ago>"proposing a hypothesis about how the natural world works and testing that hypothesis" The studies under question here don't really do that. Physicists often test their hypothesis (eg this satellite should undergo x seconds of time dilation), but in fields like biomedicine or psychology that is extremely rare. Instead they usually test a "null hypothesis" that there is no difference (eg the population mean of the treatment and control groups is the same) when their hypothesis predicts some vague but non-zero difference.
- bo1024 9y agoThe difference between testing a null hypothesis vs testing a new, proposed hypothesis does not affect my point about scientific method vs engineering.
- nonbel 9y agoSure, but I'd say there are three things going on here though. 1) Scientific method (what you originally described) 2) NHST (where some default hypothesis is tested) 3) Engineering (where you perform some kind of feat to demonstrate capability) The problems seem to be with people doing #2 rather than the others.