4 ms·

> I think "show just how science works" has become a bit of a meme for "we need to roll back this mistaken/over-ambitious claim". You say this as if it's a sma

> I think "show just how science works" has become a bit of a meme for "we need to roll back this mistaken/over-ambitious claim". You say this as if it's a small feat. The willingness to rollback a claim you made, ambitious or mundane, is surprisingly difficult for people to do. Most of science is about making claims based on the best evidence that you have with some level of confidence. Where we run into problems, just look in the news, is when claims become invariant, regardless of new data, methods, theories.

dnautics 6y ago
You're arguing past GP. It's one thing to be mistaken for subtle or deep reasons and say "this is how science works". It's another to be sloppy and say "this is how science works". I'm not even saying scientists shouldn't ever be sloppy, you should definitely start sloppy and there's also a sense in which if observations are reproducible across sloppy setups it's more robust - but also, maybe one should not take out a headline-grabbing presser based on sloppy or shaky work. And it's hard to argue that the social structure of contemporary scientific discovery doesn't incentives this sort of sloppiness.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It's one thing to be mistaken for subtle or deep reasons and say "this is how science works". It's another to be sloppy and say "this is how science works". There is a difference, but since both kinds of errors are widespread among humans, and science addresses both problems with a common solution, and nonscientific methods of generating systems of belief about the material world are prone to error due to their failures to correct both problems, I don't think there's really that material of a difference unless you mean “you” in the narrow individual sense of the specific actor making the initial error, in which case—and only in which case—is the difference at all significant.
  - dash2 6y ago
    Unfortunately science too has its own failure modes, including the incentives to overclaim. I don't say this was true here. Source: am academic scientist, though not in a very rigorous field.

dnautics 6y ago

You're arguing past GP. It's one thing to be mistaken for subtle or deep reasons and say "this is how science works". It's another to be sloppy and say "this is how science works". I'm not even saying scientists shouldn't ever be sloppy, you should definitely start sloppy and there's also a sense in which if observations are reproducible across sloppy setups it's more robust - but also, maybe one should not take out a headline-grabbing presser based on sloppy or shaky work. And it's hard to argue that the social structure of contemporary scientific discovery doesn't incentives this sort of sloppiness.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> It's one thing to be mistaken for subtle or deep reasons and say "this is how science works". It's another to be sloppy and say "this is how science works". There is a difference, but since both kinds of errors are widespread among humans, and science addresses both problems with a common solution, and nonscientific methods of generating systems of belief about the material world are prone to error due to their failures to correct both problems, I don't think there's really that material of a difference unless you mean “you” in the narrow individual sense of the specific actor making the initial error, in which case—and only in which case—is the difference at all significant.
- dash2 6y ago
  Unfortunately science too has its own failure modes, including the incentives to overclaim. I don't say this was true here. Source: am academic scientist, though not in a very rigorous field.