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Ah, I wouldn't be so sure. John Ioannidis's work does a great job of showing how science as we've defined it can generate results that are wrong. There are plen

Ah, I wouldn't be so sure. John Ioannidis's work does a great job of showing how science as we've defined it can generate results that are wrong. There are plenty of phenomena that can't be easily sussed out using the scientific method of controlled experimentation. The simplest example is if you need two parts A AND B to generate an effect. If you add A, you get nothing. If you add B, you get nothing. The scientific method suggests that both A and B do nothing. It takes a bit more clever work to recognize that both are required, but the scientific method insists on simplifying the model. The point is that even science isn't well-defined and we need to be super flexible.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> The scientific method suggests that both A and B do nothing. It takes a bit more clever work to recognize that both are required, but the scientific method insists on simplifying the model. Huh? No it doesn't. This is complete nonsense. The scientific method would deal with this by hypothesizing that A combined with B might do something, then testing the hypothesis, and discovering that it does. Generating that hypothesis might be difficult--nobody said science was easy. But there's nothing about the scientific method that can't handle the situation you propose. There are hundreds of examples of this. Try, for example, hydrochloric acid and baking soda as your A and B--I've never mixed these two and don't know what they produce, but based on my knowledge of acids and baking soda, I hypothesize they will result in CO2, even though neither of these decomposes into that gas by itself.