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" by people who study philosophy of science. The consensus, which I agree with, is that it doesn't refelct how science atually works and " Science 'works' toda

" by people who study philosophy of science. The consensus, which I agree with, is that it doesn't refelct how science atually works and " Science 'works' today by p-hacking and data falsification. I'm not sure that we should consider current practices an argument against a quality threshold.

jimwhite42 3y ago
Aren't you mixing two distinct things here?
- glenstein 3y ago
  I think you're right to identify two distinct things in the air, but it's the other guy doing the mixing. What science is and the extent to which that is approximated in practice are indeed two things. Neither is inherently more real or true than the other, or necessarily more right, depending on the context. But I take this particular context to be about Sagan's comments on distinguishing truth from "baloney" via science by expressing principles that best express the scientific ideal. I don't take that to be "corrected" by appealing to science as practiced, which is where the mixing up of the two comes in.
  - jimwhite42 3y ago
    I think there's a subtlety which isn't implicit in what you say. There is the ideal of science - which I think there's a case to be made that it's not something that can be fixed, but constantly evolves - and the practice. But I think there's also a separate distinction between good faith and successful enough attempts to do science, and people just gaming the system. The fact that there's plenty of the latter must be acknowledged (in fact, I think the people who discovered this current set of issues and made a big deal of it are from the same group of academics as the ones abusing this loophole, and also, it's likely to be a perennial problem), but the former also exists and is not the same as the abstract ideal you bring up. I'm not sure I would characterize Sagan's system here as specifically best expressing the scientific ideal. I think it's a great list to think carefully about to help with clear thinking, but I'm not sure applying the label of 'science' to all these points is the right way to think about them, although I'm not sure it isn't either.
fastaguy88 3y ago
Perhaps you meant to day "science doesn't work by p-hacking and data falsification". The great thing about science is that it involves a process of building models and hypotheses, and then running experiments to produce results that support the models and hypotheses. To the extent that p-hacking and data falsification produce results that are not correct, longer term they will have a difficult time distorting our understanding of the underlying phenomena. Short-term, certainly they can be distracting, but we care about reproducibility because scientists are constantly trying to reproduce (possibly by building on older) results. Results that cannot be reproduced do not contribute to science.

jimwhite42 3y ago

Aren't you mixing two distinct things here?

glenstein 3y ago
I think you're right to identify two distinct things in the air, but it's the other guy doing the mixing. What science is and the extent to which that is approximated in practice are indeed two things. Neither is inherently more real or true than the other, or necessarily more right, depending on the context. But I take this particular context to be about Sagan's comments on distinguishing truth from "baloney" via science by expressing principles that best express the scientific ideal. I don't take that to be "corrected" by appealing to science as practiced, which is where the mixing up of the two comes in.
- jimwhite42 3y ago
  I think there's a subtlety which isn't implicit in what you say. There is the ideal of science - which I think there's a case to be made that it's not something that can be fixed, but constantly evolves - and the practice. But I think there's also a separate distinction between good faith and successful enough attempts to do science, and people just gaming the system. The fact that there's plenty of the latter must be acknowledged (in fact, I think the people who discovered this current set of issues and made a big deal of it are from the same group of academics as the ones abusing this loophole, and also, it's likely to be a perennial problem), but the former also exists and is not the same as the abstract ideal you bring up. I'm not sure I would characterize Sagan's system here as specifically best expressing the scientific ideal. I think it's a great list to think carefully about to help with clear thinking, but I'm not sure applying the label of 'science' to all these points is the right way to think about them, although I'm not sure it isn't either.

fastaguy88 3y ago

Perhaps you meant to day "science doesn't work by p-hacking and data falsification". The great thing about science is that it involves a process of building models and hypotheses, and then running experiments to produce results that support the models and hypotheses. To the extent that p-hacking and data falsification produce results that are not correct, longer term they will have a difficult time distorting our understanding of the underlying phenomena. Short-term, certainly they can be distracting, but we care about reproducibility because scientists are constantly trying to reproduce (possibly by building on older) results. Results that cannot be reproduced do not contribute to science.