4 ms·
Maybe I'm missing something, but 'self-correcting' doesn't necessarily mean 'immediately self-correcting'. I guess it's safe to assume, that incorrect studies a
by blue_pants 4y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but 'self-correcting' doesn't necessarily mean 'immediately self-correcting'. I guess it's safe to assume, that incorrect studies are not cementing our world view and entirely stopping us from questioning studied topics again.
The way I see the self-correcting nature of science: the truthiness of our view about specific set of topics increases over time (in some approximation).
- mike_hearn 4y agoSelf-correcting doesn't mean immediately self correcting, but it does imply self-correcting in a somewhat reasonable time period, and ideally not needing to self correct too often. What's reasonable, well, probably not years or decades. Average people cannot make major errors that destroy the value of their job output and then blow it off with "well but the company self corrected eventually so please don't fire me". When they judge science, they will judge it by the standards they are themselves held to in normal jobs. And what's too often, well, probably papers that don't replicate should be a clear minority instead of (in some fields) the majority. Recall that failure to replicate is only one of many things that can go wrong with a study. Even if the replication rate was 100% many fields would still be filled with unusable papers.