In exploratory research you collect a bunch of data, and then mine it for interesting associations that might merit further study. It's an essential part of the scientific process, but anything you find from doing it needs to be treated as extremely tentative because it's liable to produce spurious results at least as often as it finds genuine effects.

But that's not what this paper's talking about. It's talking about experiments that are being used to support the approval of new treatments and drugs. That's confirmatory research. In that realm you absolutely must paint the target on the wall before you throw your darts.

If the experiment is constructed correctly, it can support validation of multiple hypotheses.

I would completely believe that most experimentation being performed currently is not structured to make further exploitation possible.

Could you provide an example of an experimental structure that is immune to the statistics being discussed?

It should read:

I would completely believe that most experimentation being performed currently is not structured to make further exploitation, of the type desired/wished, possible.

There are almost certainly facts available that are not discovered/discussed from past experiments. Many of them are likely trivial and/or not what researchers would wish or hope that their data could tell them. However, they can still be mined.

In any case though, you would still re-run experiments to further validate/reject the hypotheses. That is simply basic science.

Are you claiming that this statement is untrue, or irrelevant?

> Besides, you would always run a new experiment again anyway.

Then surely the initial experiment doesn't count. Otherwise, why are you re-running it?

Every experiment will support analysis through a set of hypotheses. Just because you didn't select all of those hypotheses before the experiment ran doesn't mean you can't select it after the experiment.

Imagine that an experiment has been run, but you do not know the results (or even what was done). Now you select a hypothesis, if the experiment required to validate the hypothesis is the same as what was run previously, you can now look at and use the results.

A hypothesis is like running a query against a database. Many queries are valid, even though the data may not have changed.

>Otherwise, why are you re-running it?

Science requires it. Doctrine from one-off experimentation is religion (hard to dump).