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It's like saying that we can't know whether parachutes reduce injuries when falling from airplanes because we've never had a proper experiment to verify this an
by PeterisP 5y ago
It's like saying that we can't know whether parachutes reduce injuries when falling from airplanes because we've never had a proper experiment to verify this and most likely won't ever run one.
We can know all kinds of things with a reasonable degree of certainty even if we can't or won't verify them experimentally.
- charcircuit 5y ago>because we've never had a proper experiment to verify this and most likely won't ever run one. Isn't it trivial to drop something out of an airplane along with the same thing but with a parachute and measure the impact velocity?
- jstanley 5y agoBut that doesn't prove anything about how effective they are at preventing injury.
- charcircuit 5y agoI'm not sure what you mean. We can prove that a parachute allows people to survive jumping out of an airplane with limited injuries. They are effective.
- jstanley 5y agoFor example, the fact that the impact velocity of some random object is reduced doesn't mean it is reduced from a harmful range to a non-harmful range. It might be equally harmful or equally harmless either way, or there might be additional factors at play in the case of human parachutists that we haven't thought about yet. We don't have enough data on people jumping out of planes without parachutes to conclude that the parachutes are actually working. They could just be superstition.
- goatlover 5y agoThat's absurd. The mechanics of gravity, parachutes and jumping out of planes is well understood. Plenty of people have fallen from heights without parachutes, and we know what happens to them and why (acceleration of gravity and the force impact on their bodies). We also know how parachutes, used properly, mostly prevent that sort of harm (slow people down enough to prevent excess force when impacting the ground). There's nothing superstitious about it.
- PeterisP 5y agoYes, and in a similar manner we can know quite a lot about how people would behave in situations like the one in Milgram's experiment even if we won't ever do an exact replication.
- hnaccount_rng 5y agoYes, BUT in similar situations people behave very differently than the ones in Milgram's experiment. This is the whole point of it being not replicable. That this remains true is due to a) no one being allowed to repeat Milgram's experiment exactly and b) more general scientific funding bodies not allocating money for pure replications.
- caf 5y agoSounds like you have a solid hypothesis there with a convincing proposed method of action.
- goatlover 5y agoAre you saying parachutes have never been reliably tested?
- scoofy 5y agoThe paper they're referring to is a quasi-satirical piece about double-blind testing. The idea is that if double-blind studies are required for knowledge about medicine, then we have no evidence that parachutes have any affect on saving the lives of people falling from an airplane because it's unethical to give people in a testing environment a placebo, because they would die.
- shakna 5y agoWe have, in fact, thrown human analogues out of planes with and without parachutes. There are many ways to experimentally verify things in ways that don't require the use of an actual human - and in fact the development of accurate analogues is its own active area of research so that we can continue to expand experimental research into new areas.
- caf 5y agoThis just seems to push the results down one level - how did we do the experiments to determine that the analogues are accurate?
- shakna 5y agoSome historical studies, some modern studies, on human bodies. By combining the data we have on things like nerve conduction studies, muscular studies, in the living and then experiments on cadavers donated to science, and so on and so forth.
- scoofy 5y agoThe why were these experiments done in the first place? I certainly take your point and know the paper you're talking about. Is it obvious that humans will generally shock people until they are told not to? Is it obvious that randomly assigned students will take on the roles that they are given? I don't think it's obvious. I think that is why the studies were done in the first place, and I am generally quite skeptical of the results. There is no way to verify them, thus teaching them is genuinely bad science.
- PeterisP 5y ago> Is it obvious that humans will generally shock people until they are told not to? Is it obvious that randomly assigned students will take on the roles that they are given? It's certainly not obvious, so verification is informative, and that likely was the motivation for doing the experiments. However, despite their flaws - they were limited and biased in various ways - it certainly would be far, far worse science to base our teaching solely on one's assumptions/scepticism/opinion about how things should be, instead of taking into account whatever limited data these experiments provided. Sure, it would be better to have more and better data, but since we won't get it, this does provide relevant information.
- kuhewa 5y agoAgreed, and they aren't isolated in terms of seminal studies that probably won't be replicated. No ethics board is going to allow us to strap down a seal and put it's head underwater, but that's how we learned a lot about mammalian diving physiology.
- hnaccount_rng 5y agoThe cynic in me answers this with: "Because they got professorships out of it". But then I'm quite cynical