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I'd add a last point that a scientific paper (or a particular experimental result) is not sufficient for 'science'. Citing a paper as either a truth or discover
by toufka 9y ago
I'd add a last point that a scientific paper (or a particular experimental result) is not sufficient for 'science'. Citing a paper as either a truth or discovery is a disingenuous. The endeavour of science gets at a kind of consensus by having lots of papers, lots of experiments, lots of additional layers of experiments build on each other. And yes it's annoying to realize a given paper is misleading, has errors, or is even wrong - but that annoyance and workarounds are part of the scientific process. It's actually fairly rare for an experiment or paper to be strong enough to stand completely on its own as a singular, thorough, and completed discovery. If you've been part of the scientific field you know that it yet takes years after even a good publication for the knowledge to accrete to the greater scientific body.
Some of the best advice I got was to spend a lot more time than one might want to really come up with an experimental design that avoided a statistical outcome and instead probed at an either/or mechanism. It's not always possible, but when it is, it can be a powerful reply to fighting statistical battles (see the Michelson-Morely experiment for a classic example).
Further careers, families, reputations, humans are also part of that scientific process, which together with the above require and admit some deviation from perfect efficiency. Which we as a society should demand be okay.
- chrisfosterelli 9y agoThank you for saying this! This is a common view I see outside academia, where people interpret a single paper to mean that something is definitively shown. I think news organizations make this worse. Whenever a new paper comes out they'll champion it as fact if doing so leads to clicks. Peer reviewers can only hope to validate that the science was done well, not that it is inarguably correct. It requires a body of work around a topic before it's fair to say at all that something is "for sure" proven.
- JackFr 9y ago> I think news organizations make this worse. University PR is far more guilty. Buzzfeed isn't scanning the current issue of "Physical Review Letters" for the latest scoop.
- wrp 9y ago> ...come up with an experimental design that avoided a statistical outcome and instead probed at an either/or mechanism. That is the idea behind Rutherford's famous motto, If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.