Hacker News Reader

Comment by llamaimperative | Hacker News Reader

I think it's much, much more powerful to think of "failure to replicate" as "failure to generalize."

In lieu of actual fraud or a methodological mistake that wasn't represented/caught in peer review, it's still extremely difficult to control for all possible sources of variation. That's especially true as you go further "up the stack" from math -> physics -> chem -> bio -> psych -> social. It is absolutely possible to honestly conduct a very high quality experiment with a real finding, but fail to account for something like "on the way here, 80% of participants encountered a frustrating traffic jam."

Their finding could be true for people who just encountered a traffic jam, and lack of replication would be due to an unsuccessful generalization from what they found.

View on HN

Dislike being a pedant but the stack was missing math up front

Haha, math strikes me as a bit different from the others... but I'll add it just for you ;)

Dislike being a pedant but the stack is missing philosophy up front.

Math isn't a science, it is a tool we can use to construct coherent arguments. We can do this about our world, which science aims to do, but we can do this about many worlds. We can consider correct deductions within a mathematical system as fact, but they do not represent facts in the "real" world.

Elegant explanation of why I felt it didn’t belong! Thanks for writing :)

> but they do not represent facts in the "real" world.

In what sense do they not? On the assumption that there can be other "worlds" for which math, but not physics, holds?

Yes, you can make perfectly valid mathematical systems that have zero anchoring to any physical reality we experience (such as, trivially, n-dimensional geometries).

A geology that isn't anchored to our physical reality seems intrinsically invalid.

In our universe there are some number of physical constants that cannot be determined from maths alone, but only measured. If you go about changing these physical constants then we don't have physics as we know it (change 1/137 to 1/140 and electromagnetics no longer works). You get some totally different physics of which there may be nothing more complicated than hydrogen, or maybe hydrogen doesn't even exist at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant

One I always go back to: You can represent a perfect impulse (think electrical signals, a switch from 0 (low voltage) to 1 (high voltage)) mathematically, but it's impossible to physically create.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com