Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

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it's all science, not just "psychology."

i'm working my way through [1] to try and internalize the ability to recognize the weasel. The part about a test that's 80% accurate for positive, and 9.6% false positive rate made intuitive sense to me, and yet something like "15% of doctors get it right."

The excuses abound: You need a "lab", there's no money in replication, "science marches on[2]", and so on. It's just a cover for an alternate economy, at this point. I'm sorry if you're a scientist doing actual science and your entire foundation is being chipped away at by these heathens.

  [1] https://www.norvig.com/experiment-design.html posted here earlier this week.
  [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceMarchesOn - "New discoveries make old theories obsolete and stories retroactively inaccurate."

I agree it’s a crisis, and I’ve wondered what we should do about this. Any thoughts?

It'd take something like encouraging through monetization the replication of papers / experiments, with completely transparent methods (i.e. a video archive, or such).

However i presuppose that we can also fix greed, payola (and other bribery), litigation of results that some don't like, and so on. I don't think those are solvable (in my lifetime, probably.)

So an alternative would be for a non-profit with large funding to open laboratories around the planet and run replication experiments; this would need to be their only purpose. You'd have to figure out how to convince people to do the thankless work of proving or disproving others' experiments, designs, and so on. Even if you somehow could assign prestige for being the hardest-nosed re-researcher in the program...

And even then, you'll still have people that believe outlandish, patently unbelievable things. You'll still be unable to be 100% sure that something is correct.

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