Re:Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved ...
by gmueckl on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @12:01PM
(#18293584)
I am about to get really mad about statements like this one. It contains an egregious generalization within itself, rendering it essentially untrue.
The papers check results in fields like medicine and psychology which are plagued by the fact that they have to rely on various kind of effects from random sampling of study participants and statistics. I am not surprised that a study with 10 participants leads to wrong results with a significant probability.
But this does not generalize to science in general. Physics and chemistry do not suffer fron this because their experiments have fundamentally different setups. So extrapolating from medicine to "most science is wrong" is just as wrong. You need to approach these fields differently when you want to know how many wrong results are published.
The papers check results in fields like medicine and psychology which are plagued by the fact that they have to rely on various kind of effects from random sampling of study participants and statistics. I am not surprised that a study with 10 participants leads to wrong results with a significant probability.
But this does not generalize to science in general. Physics and chemistry do not suffer fron this because their experiments have fundamentally different setups. So extrapolating from medicine to "most science is wrong" is just as wrong. You need to approach these fields differently when you want to know how many wrong results are published.