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My EngD supervisor explained to me that it's harder to prove something doesn't work than that it does. A negative result thus has to pass a much higher bar and
by extasia 3y ago
My EngD supervisor explained to me that it's harder to prove something doesn't work than that it does.
A negative result thus has to pass a much higher bar and prove that it wasn't methodologically flawed in any way, whereas a positive result has a much lower bar to pass.
- caddemon 3y agoThat's an interesting theoretical argument but in practice the much larger reason is that a negative result is not sexy. Regardless, I don't agree with this philosophy when it comes to the functioning of the scientific system. A field like biology has many real results that are highly context-dependent. If we are going to allow people to regularly publish highly controlled studies and then make grand conclusions based on them (with real $$$ impact btw), we sure as shit need people publishing their observations about when something didn't generalize for them. Not every paper needs to be a rock solid scientific conclusion, and it's pretty obvious that in practice many papers now aren't anyway. Why we play this silly game of pretend with scientific formalisms is beyond me. Science is getting larger and more complex, and there is 0 reason to assume that the way to scale is to have every lab try to tackle questions from start to finish in a nearly identical way.
- extasia 3y agoI'm inclined to agree. Another weird effect I've heard of (2nd hand) act against publishing negative results is the social cost of casting doubt over a colleagues work. If science isn't reproducible its basically useless