It seems we are increasingly leaving the scientific method out of science. The scientific method is the most powerful tool we have to determine causation. It's

It seems we are increasingly leaving the scientific method out of science. The scientific method is the most powerful tool we have to determine causation. It's also very strict, which means that it's limited in applicability. It's strict because you have to intervene in the real world after forming a hypothesis about what change might be caused by that intervention. The experiment should be constructed to try to refute the hypothesis. Increasingly, what I'm seeing is observational "science", where you keep forming hypothesis until you find one that fits the data you have. Another thing I see, which this MIT study appears to be, is where the scientists completely make up a fictional world (called a model), and intervene in that fictional world. (Note: models are more likely to work when they aren't completely made up by scientists. For instance, mouse models are very important to life sciences. But the reason they are useful is because scientists can't make up a complete fiction to support their preferred conclusion -- they still have to face the realities of mammals in all their complexity.) I wish we could have a different word for this, so that people can't use the vaneer of science to add authority to something as though it were a law of physics.