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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

Agreed on the first half of your comment.

Philosophy of science, however, is a well established, important, and fascinating field. Keywords: Positivists/Viennese circle, Karl Popper and falsification, Feyerabend and Against Method, Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, W. V. Quine and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism, the Science Wars.

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I don't blame them for not wanting what appears to be a mix of philosophy into science though - in the same way it is understandable that people who never knew what suffrage was would oppose women's suffrage because they think it involves torment. Ignorant but understandable. Unfortunately, philosophy has a long history of actively defining itself as willfully not referencing reality for validation. Not wanting that mixed with science is understandable even if rooted in ignorance.

To add to that: the new experimentalists, Mayo‘s Error statistics and the rise of Bayesianism

Thanks for the Mayo recommendation. I am currently going through her Statistical Inference as Severe Testing, and find it very tiring. So far very little is about actual statistics and the meat of disputes, but rather about meta questions and the he-said, she-said of those disputes. Maybe the prior book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge is a better exposition of the ideas?

I got mich out of it, but only on the meta level also. Afair she never goes into technical detail of e.g. Neyman Pearson, but covers things like how to overcome the Quine-Duhem-problem with statistics, or how to stengthen Popper’s theory. But on that level I learned a lot, and it trickles down to what is important in actual experimental design and why.

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