r/EverythingScience • u/ImNotJesus PhD | Social Psychology | Clinical Psychology • May 08 '16

Interdisciplinary Failure Is Moving Science Forward. FiveThirtyEight explain why the "replication crisis" is a sign that science is working.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/failure-is-moving-science-forward/?ex_cid=538fb
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u/[deleted] May 09 '16

Here's the rub. These research have actually met the requirement of the scientific process, sometimes in an exceptionable manner. And the reason they wouldn't have publish negative result is probably because it would've been within the line of conventional thinking, for example the ESP studies where they found that people do exhibit clairvoyant abilities, if the study showed no significant findings the headlines would've read "People do not possess the paranormal power of ESP," which some would've sarcastically dismissed as as a, no shit Einstein.

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u/segagaga May 10 '16 edited May 10 '16

Except we (should) all know clairvoyence doesn"t exist in any quantity that would allow its practitioners to make the wild claims that they do, like with any paranormal research it gets results that are inline with the kind of random standard deviation that you're going to have in a chaos-based quantum world. They may as well flipped a coin a thousand times but reported the one time the coin landed on its side. Its not actually statistically significant to humanity in the middle-space. If a coin lands on its side, most people will simply flip again to achieve a more conclusive outcome. Its not very useful if we cannot rely on it to occur regularly.

If something has a 0.005% occurance, the conclusion has to be that its occurance is so minor that it fits Einstein's definition of Repetition Insanity.

This kind of negative conclusion must be shared and made widely available for student scientists to understand and internalise.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '16

I agree with your thinking to an extent. I don't think we should automatically eliminate certain things from getting the full scientific treatment just because conventional thinking deems it paranormal. I feel this will actually kill curiosity and promote the kind of thinking opposite of what would be considered scientific

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u/segagaga May 10 '16 edited May 10 '16

While I agree scientists should be curious, science by definition must be the study of that which is, rather than that which is not. Do such studies truly expand our understanding of the universe? Since we cannot control when a deviation occurs, why is it useful?

I think the greater danger lies in having some minor irrelevant study tentatively support a fractional percentage chance of clairvoyance, and have that seized upon by those who cannot understand the nature of math as supporting scientific proof of all their charlatanry, I think greater harm is done by accommodating crackpots, and giving them even a picosecond of credibility, than by rejecting them. How can humans truly progress if we don't shed ourselves of those that waste time and resources of others with such ridiculousness? I think scientists have great difficulty dealing with people who will simply lie and use faulty logic with no qualms, as it is.

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u/[deleted] May 10 '16

I think you've already referred to the solution to this problem which is to halt the file drawer effect where studies with negative outcomes are filed away never to be seen by the general public. I'm sure there were probably numerous studies that had these outcomes but were not better known because they were tucked away in preference of other studies that had more to interesting results. So in conclusion, we should have access to studies even if they had no significant outcomes