> The 0.05 threshold is indeed arbitrary, but the scientific method is sound.
Agreed. A single published paper is not science, a tree data structure of published papers that all build off of each other is science.
Agreed. A single published paper is not science, a tree data structure of published papers that all build off of each other is science.
But if you take a lot of bricks and arrange them appropriately, then every single one of those bricks is wall.
In other words, just like the article points out down in the "dos" section, it depends on how you're treating that single unreplicated paper. Are you cherry-picking it, looking at it in isolation, and treating it as if it were definitive all by itself? Or are you considering it within a broader context of prior and related work, and thinking carefully about the strengths, limitations, and possible lacunae of the work it represents?
If a new paper with an outrageous claim pops up, people are automatically suspicious. Until it’s been reproduced by a few labs, it’s just “interesting”.
Then once it’s been validated and new science is built off of it, it’s not really accepted as foundational.