2 ms·

Pretty much The Popperian view that everything is testable and falsifiable (given that in the real world there are limited resources and time) is counter-produ

• yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  What? "This medicine produces X effect in Y% of the experimental group with Z p-value" is absolutely testable and falsifiable.
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    > "This medicine produces X effect in Y% of the experimental group with Z p-value" is absolutely testable and falsifiable. Correct. It is, up to a range. If I replicate the experiment I'll have a different Y% which might be a slight difference or not. But since it's not 100%, your theory about that experiment has been falsified. It's easy to talk about falsifiability giving examples about black swans but that's a naive view in terms of results which are not clear yes/no answers and where multiple variables interact.
    • rsfern 5y ago
      You’re describing reproducibility in checking a hypothesis about statistical association. There doesn’t need to be any theory involved to generate that hypothesis. Often there is, but often in modern drug discovery pipeline the lead generation comes first and theory comes later. A theory-based hypothesis in this case would be something like, we think this disease is caused by this specific protein causes a disease, and this drug candidate will bind well to the protein and inhibit the disease causing reaction, so the drug will be useful to treat the disease. There are experiments to be done to check each element in that chain of theory, including the statistical association of disease outcomes