We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

Re:We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Bee... by shkkmo on Friday July 29, 2016 @05:07PM (#12189992)

If you think about it, complete replication of any experiment is useless, and impossible.

But that doesn't matter, because it is not the experiment you are trying to replicate, is the effect or the observation.

Carefully changing the design of the experiment can allow to verify that your explanation of the effect or observation is accurate.

Of course, if the change the experiment too much, a failure to replicated will have less useful information.

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Re:We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Bee... by bordercases on Monday August 08, 2016 @02:06PM (#12249691)

In hindsight I do think it's true that you want numerous experiments with possibly different controls with the exception of whatever is important for the effect. In that sense you want your experiment to "discover the right abstraction" of details that your principle works over.

So I think what has to occur is a gradual "loosening up" of the controls from strict replication to weak replication, with both types of replication giving information about the effect you are testing: its validity and its generality, respectively.

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