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If 20 different people all conduct the same experiment, and the 19 negative results are never published, there is no fraud involved when the 20th person publish
by whack 2y ago
If 20 different people all conduct the same experiment, and the 19 negative results are never published, there is no fraud involved when the 20th person publishes his positive result without realizing it is a 5% statistical anomaly. That person probably has no idea that 19 other people tried and failed at near-identical experiments.
This seems like such an obvious problem in the way science is currently done. Are people so focused on their own individual fields that they aren't thinking about and fixing such glaring meta problems?
- prerok 2y agoAs others already pointed out, there is no incentive to do so. Consider: "Hey, look, I went on top of tower of Pisa and threw down two identically shaped balls, one iron and one wooden. They dropped at the same time!" The above is the expected result and would only be interesting if the result is different from expectation. Now, if 1000 scientists did this and each published the confirmation of what we knew would happen then who would read that? But, if one scientist said: "I tried and they drop at different times!" that would be different. The 999 scientists would then try to replicate again and then the papers of the 999 would be interesting again.
- humansareok1 2y agoThis is completely different from one lab running the same experiment 20 times and publishing the one positive result.