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>> To actually run the experiment would have been to run the risk that a disordered environment has no effect on racial attitudes—a “null finding” that would me
by oska 13y ago
>> To actually run the experiment would have been to run the risk that a disordered environment has no effect on racial attitudes—a “null finding” that would mean he’d wasted his time, because journals aren’t usually interested in experiments that don’t prove something new.
This state of affairs has of course been remarked on before. Perhaps this could be rectified by creating an online journal with the title Null that only accepts papers recording experiments where the hypothesis was not proved. Of course it wouldn't make very interesting reading but after some time it might provide a useful reality check against novel claims, when a search in Null shows the x number of times a similar hypothesis was not proved. And the incentive to publish there would be to show that you are a credible scientist who sometimes, quite reasonably, comes up with hypotheses that when properly tested don't prove to be true.
- jarrett 13y agoAlong similar lines, I've wondered whether an enterprising scientist could glamorize the search for null results by deliberately targeting previously published papers. So you don't just formulate random hypotheses, test them, and then report the null hypothesis. Instead, you pick out an influential paper and debunk it experimentally. I presume you'd consider suspiciousness when choosing your targets. E.g. a p-value just under 0.05 would be one signal you'd consider. If journals like dramatic submissions, perhaps mythbuting previous papers would provide the requisite drama. Scientists out there, how do you think that would go over with journals?
- explicate 13y agoAn online journal like in support of the null hypothesis like what you describe can be found here http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/ It's published online bi-yearly.
- oska 13y agoThank you for that. And from scanning the titles of the papers listed there, it actually does look like interesting reading.
- toby 13y agoThere are also Journals of Negative Results in a few fields, such as this one: http://www.jnrbm.com/ http://www.jnrbm.com/
- ForHackernews 13y agoYou'd have to get university tenure committees and national grant committees to consider publishing in Null to be prestigious, or else scientists will have no interest in it.
- phreeza 13y agoPeople publish in unprestigous