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Not to be too cheeky here, but what was the null hypothesis? That male and female brains would look exactly the same? Seems a bit like a so-called "straw man" (
by plg 13y ago
Not to be too cheeky here, but what was the null hypothesis? That male and female brains would look exactly the same? Seems a bit like a so-called "straw man" (or straw woman?) hypothesis to me.
- toufka 13y agoIn hard science, the null hypothesis is often 'straw-man-like', and that's usually just fine. Because, oftentimes the straw-man haunts by being kind of true, sometimes. Reality is so strange that doing en experiment that controls well enough to (near-) conclusively exclude even a trivial hypothesis is a good experiment. Not the best experiment, but a good experiment.
- vacri 13y agoYou don't need a null hypothesis to do science. If you want to measure the strength of the Moon's gravitational pull, no-one's going to complain that you haven't outlined a null hypothesis. There's all kinds of good science done that doesn't use the null hypothesis - it's a myth that if one isn't presented, then it's "not science".
- plg 13y agotrue ... but often (as in the case of this article) the results are presented as if they are a surprise... which implies a null hypothesis anyway I agree with you, one doesn't need a null hypothesis to measure things on the other hand to advance theories, in other words to test and reject (or fail to reject) hypotheses, one does need ... hypotheses[1] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper
- 1457389 13y agoYou are talking past his point, perhaps willfully... They are saying that in hard science it is often useful to start with a null hypothesis, and report anything that diverges from that as potentially significant (assuming statistical significance of the divergence).
- Fomite 13y agoHell, given the null hypothesis is an assertion of perfect equality, I'd argue it's inherently a straw-man. It's one of the reasons behind "Fail to reject H0" rather than "Accept".