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If you can't follow the scientific method most of the time, should their work be considered science at all?
by wallace_f 7y ago
If you can't follow the scientific method most of the time, should their work be considered science at all?
- utopian3 7y agoThis is my concern. If you can only partially trust the science journals because the science is faulty, what “science” can you trust? ... unless you attempt replicate every piece of research yourself?
- mattkrause 7y agoAre you actually arguing that randomized controlled trials aren't following the scientific method?
- wallace_f 7y agoClinical trials are not true repeatable, scientific experiments. They're really just controlled studies which are the best that can be done in the absence of the possibility of a controlled experiment. In psychology, this however is just the tip of an iceberg of problems with such research being unscientific.
- mattkrause 7y agoI don't follow. An experiment needs to be repeatable in principle. You don't actually have to re-run it with the exact same specimens or subjects; they can be sampled from some larger population that you're studying (e.g., patients with depression). Nevertheless, you can often do something like a cross-over design that lets you repeatedly test the same patients in different conditions.