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If something can’t be reproduced it definitely should be rejected.
by edgyquant 3y ago
If something can’t be reproduced it definitely should be rejected.
- wongarsu 3y agoYes, but one team failing to reproduce it doesn't mean it can't be reproduced. Once there's two or three teams unable to reproduce it we can be confident to say "the described method doesn't work".
- AstralStorm 3y agoThat usually means the initial team did not describe the experiment sufficiently accurately. (Unless it is fraud.)
- marcosdumay 3y agoOr didn't control it well enough, and the important details are something completely different. Or that they made a mistake.
- misterprime 3y agoI see a juggler handling five balls. I succeed at three balls. I fail at four balls. Have I proven that it's impossible to juggle five balls at once?
- willis936 3y agoI see a juggler handling an unspecified quantity of balls. They will not tell anyone how many balls are being handled. How do I know what they accomplished? How would I replicate it without knowing?
- jjk166 3y agoYou've proven that the juggler's instructions alone are insufficient to juggle five balls. In this case, the juggler presumably has muscle memory you don't, which is equivalent to running an experiment on equipment that behaves differently. Or perhaps the juggler didn't convey the special trick you need for four or more balls.
- tonymillion 3y agoMaybe the juggler was juggling 5 balls, but they made a mistake with serendipitous consequences and then told everyone they juggled 5 balls, when they really don’t know how they were juggling 5 balls. In fact one of them might have been a different sized ball or maybe it was a cube. Worse still, they won’t let you check their original balls to see if they actually are capable of being juggled. Lol ball juggling /s
- kurthr 3y agoIn this case I mostly agree, but more generally there are so many more wrong ways to do something difficult that you could have 100 failed replications and 2 reproductions and it would just mean 2 people did it right.
- clavalle 3y ago'Cannot' being the operative word. 'Did not' does not necessarily mean 'cannot'.
- jonnycomputer 3y agoexactly.
- 11101010001100 3y agoIf we want to go down the pedant route, the original group did not share their samples, therefore a true 'cannot reproduce' claim will remain out reach until they do so.