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Yes. Find it. And when you do, you'll have something reproducible. The purpose of science is to advance the species. Given this, when that happens, this other t

Yes. Find it. And when you do, you'll have something reproducible. The purpose of science is to advance the species. Given this, when that happens, this other thing(s) occur (or occur with a certain frequency) I agree that this is a generalization problem. I just don't believe that this particular way of describing it is helpful. If you'll allow me an apocryphal example, when Newton saw the apple fall, if he had generalized to "all things from apple trees fall at the same rate", he would have been correct for a while, then ludicrously incorrect once the leaves started blowing off in Autumn. If at that point he had tried to figure out exactly what kind of tree produces this gravity thing, or which parts of trees, we wouldn't be any further along than we were before. Generalizations work along multiple axes. With some degree of imprecision, every experiment can be a success (or failure). This is why we have the scientific method in the first place. Now, perhaps you're making the argument that this is somehow, for lack of a better term, half-science. It's not right, but it's not wrong either. It's truthy. The logical follow-up would be: ok, where is the second half? In this and many other cases there is no second half. Papers were published, people received awards, wrote books, became famous, and lots of other folks used their work. So even if somehow this is better than nothing, in practice I'm not seeing it.

ethanbond 5y ago
To be clear, in this case there appears to have been fraud ie actual falsification of data. That’s very different from the broader replication crisis, which is more of the shape of unknown parameters. The two get blurry in some places due to eg publication incentives pushing people’s interpretation of legitimate data into semi-fraudulence. But there are still two ends (at least) on the spectrum of non-replicable science. I think framing it in this lens is helpful because it points toward a solution: capturing more of the parameters more explicitly and varying them more deliberately. If we just say, “oh x y z studies aren’t replicable, field [x y z] is bullshit,” we are ending our inquiry prematurely. We are ending it at the falsification of Newton’s initial theory and saying that because leaves fall at a different rate, that gravity doesn’t exist.

ethanbond 5y ago

To be clear, in this case there appears to have been fraud ie actual falsification of data. That’s very different from the broader replication crisis, which is more of the shape of unknown parameters. The two get blurry in some places due to eg publication incentives pushing people’s interpretation of legitimate data into semi-fraudulence. But there are still two ends (at least) on the spectrum of non-replicable science. I think framing it in this lens is helpful because it points toward a solution: capturing more of the parameters more explicitly and varying them more deliberately. If we just say, “oh x y z studies aren’t replicable, field [x y z] is bullshit,” we are ending our inquiry prematurely. We are ending it at the falsification of Newton’s initial theory and saying that because leaves fall at a different rate, that gravity doesn’t exist.