3 ms·
With the current Publish or Perish zeitgeist in science this number can be seen as high. Also, even if assuming legitimate significant results, it's hard to co
by air7 8y ago
With the current Publish or Perish zeitgeist in science this number can be seen as high.
Also, even if assuming legitimate significant results, it's hard to control for every possible confounding variable: Maybe part of the effect is due to some sociological parameters of of the test group, maybe it's the heat/cold, maybe it only happens on Tuesdays. Even the same stimulus can change its meaning over time (like the Williams video). Humans make for finicky test subjects.
IMO a single scientific paper shouldn't be considered much more than a small indicator that an effect might exist and it will require further work. I think popular media does Science a disservice by ignoring this and headlining single papers as "fact".
So given that, 60% is not that bad...
- rossdavidh 8y agoTrue, but also not that good. All of the heat/cold/only on Tuesdays stuff should have been baked into the original experiment, really. Not that they should be able to take into account everything, but 60% replication does not indicate a very high standard. I mean it's not much better than if you just took and educated guess, with no data, since you could probably do better than 50/50. The whole point of the study is that it is supposed to be better than an educated guess.