News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What happens when scientists admit error. Parent comment

Re:What happens when scientists admit error by ordu on Saturday April 25, 2020 @10:54PM (#22983944)
> Maybe with a strong effect for every single subject a little more skepticism would have been warranted in the first place?

It is easy to think over these lines in hindsight[1], but it is much harder to do it when there are no known mistakes. Obviously they had some plausible hypothesis, which predicted and explained results. The more strong result is, the better for hypothesis.

I mean it was possible and maybe wise to suspect bug because results are too good. But it is hard from a cognitive standpoint. She describes bug as hard to find even after she found that results do not reproduce. It was even more hard to find this bug when there were less reasons to believe that there is a bug.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What happens when scientists admit error by magicalhippo on Saturday April 25, 2020 @11:47PM (#22984230)
A control group, using same program but with a constant radius circle, should have revealed the error quite quickly no?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What happens when scientists admit error by ordu on Sunday April 26, 2020 @02:06AM (#22984936)
I'm not sure, I didn't understand fully the bug involved. Possibly such a control group would show the dependent variable as a constant plus some random noise. It is totally expected behaviour for variable.
[ Parent | on HN ]