Hacker News Reader

Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

A lot of scientific studies (some funded by grants) are never tested through replication, even though that's a core part of the process.

Replication is the unsexy grunt work that makes science reliable, but it usually doesn't make anyone famous (or necessarily even get them tenure), because it's not bleeding edge work creating or advancing new theories.

Maybe the government should treat this like a market failure and generously fund replication studies.

Planet Money on the replication issue: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/15/463237871/episo...

Replication crisis (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

View on HN

To be fair, scientists by and large understand the need of replication, and evaluation in general. It's just in certain fields (e.g. psychology) or circumstances with human subjects, it's very expensive or even infeasible to have well controlled repeated experiments.

If you don't have well controlled, repeatable experiments (a.k.a. the scientific method) are you actually doing science? I think we should come up with another word for these types of one-off studies.

Many fields advance without solid well controlled, repeatable experiments, at least through various stages of development: cosmology, geology, most of medicine, philosophy, science of mind, etc. You don't consider those all "science"?

There's more to science than Bacon.

Those fields have scientific and non-scientific components. The non-scientific parts are not science.

Your statement is tautological. You might want to read up on epistemology and the philosophy of science -- I would start with Karl Popper. As I said, Bacon is not the definition of science.

Bizarrely, my unremarkable comment was downvoted!

I believe you were downvoted because you were factually inaccurate about the presence of scientific studies in medicine especially. Controlled, double-blind, repeatable (from a population standpoint) studies are something medicine is good at. Note that there are counter-examples of medical studies which were poorly conducted, but realize that they are the exception not the rule.

> Your statement is tautological

You want to label fields that have both scientific components and non-scientific components (in varying proportions) as "science." The point of my statement is that some of those fields have scientific aspects, and there may be sub-fields I'd categorize as "science," but I wouldn't categorize the field as a whole as "science."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com