> Note that the senior author Bhattacharya and of course Ionnadis were advancing this theory before data collection began.
Declaring a hypothesis publicly and then gathering data to see if it’s supported or not is good science, not bad.
Declaring a hypothesis publicly and then gathering data to see if it’s supported or not is good science, not bad.
Not for something like this. This study isn’t about running an experiment to see if treatment A or B is better. This is an observational study that is supposed to determine the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the population. There is no hypothesis here - That is to say, there shouldn’t be anything to prove. Whatever answer you measure, you measure (ignoring any other data collection issues).
But if you declare “I think the rate of infection is X”, and you end up with a rate of X, then no one knows if you’ve really found the rate to be X or if you put your thumb on the scales.
This should have been a fact finding mission to establish some of the basic numbers that will be needed to design the next wave of experiments or to guide policy.
Yes. It’s widely accepted as best practice by mainstream scientists.
> Why declare publicly at all then?
So people know what you were testing and so you can’t fudge it to a test more convenient for your career, politics, or bank balance.
Simply declaring your hypothesis is not best practice. Publishing the details of your experiment--the protocols, analytical methods, etc--are what's best practice, AFAIU. Few scientists run an experiment they expect to fail, and without publishing the details ahead of time it's trivial to fudge an outcome, so simply pronouncing your hypothesis is entirely uninteresting.
The solution is to publish hypothesis and test methodology ahead of time and publish your data afterward.
edit: i think we agree, misunderstanding
> The process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions.