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Posts like this are often put on hacker news. No one doubts that cherry-picking from hypothesis is real. The same goes for 'spinning' negative results. However
by evandijk70 8y ago
Posts like this are often put on hacker news. No one doubts that cherry-picking from hypothesis is real. The same goes for 'spinning' negative results.
However, the solution: "pre-register trials and only do what you say you are going to do" oversimplifies things a lot. Testing and rejecting your hypothesis is a very real part of doing science. But its also a scientists' job to come up with a new hypothesis that explains the data better. I think the real problem here is that writing something up and saying: "our initial hypothesis was wrong, we suggest this and this factor is at play" is not the way science is done currently.
- empath75 8y agoIf your study took a lot of wrong turns, include that in an appendix at least.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wsy 8y agoIt is not 'oversimplification', but pointing out the traps and pitfalls of empirical validation. If you gain new hypotheses in the process of validating and falsifying your old ones, you need a second, independent study to validate the new ones. You anyway always run the danger that the result you found is a random artefact of your study participant group. If you validate the new insights with the same group, this risk becomes uncontrollable (e.g., confidence intervals become meaningless in such a setting).