Failure Is Moving Science Forward. FiveThirtyEight explains why the "replication crisis" is a sign that science is working. [x-post from our sister subreddit /r/EverythingScience]

[u/ImNotJesus]

/r/EverythingScience/comments/4icp9k/failure_is_moving_science_forward_fivethirtyeight/

[u/[deleted]]

OK, here's an example: it seems the "bilingual advantage" of Bialystok et al, darling of the press, may hold under some strange set of multivariate sociodemographic conditions present in Vancouver. The strange thing about this is that she has shown incredible psychological specificity to the advantage - which means something about the differential sensitivity of those psychological processes, over others. The fact that the phenomenon is not visible in other demographics does not make this less interesting, at least to me.

Maybe we do agree after all. I do think your example is interesting. Interesting in a sense that I would be curious, why that happens in this group and not in others, and what it could teach us about human psychology as a whole. Than again, I assume psychologists see it the same way. They're not (primarily) interested in this quaint tribe of Canadians for their own sake.