Re:Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech
by nostrademons on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @05:20PM
(#28227326)
Be careful about assuming malice where ignorance exists.
It's possible for 90% of papers to be rubbish without any ill intent or dishonesty on the part of the experimenter. They might simply suffer from "works for me" syndrome, as it afflicts software developers. In science, this equates to failing to control for all the possible confounding factors that might affect the result of the experiment. They might have carefully controlled for everything they thought of and gotten methodologically valid results, but then when another experimenter tries to replicate it, they find their experimental environment is different in a way that neither considered important but alters the results.
Finding all these conflaters is the point of science. If you can't replicate the experiment, it means the results don't hold, but it doesn't mean the investigators were bad people - and assuming they are is unlikely to get better science.
It's possible for 90% of papers to be rubbish without any ill intent or dishonesty on the part of the experimenter. They might simply suffer from "works for me" syndrome, as it afflicts software developers. In science, this equates to failing to control for all the possible confounding factors that might affect the result of the experiment. They might have carefully controlled for everything they thought of and gotten methodologically valid results, but then when another experimenter tries to replicate it, they find their experimental environment is different in a way that neither considered important but alters the results.
Finding all these conflaters is the point of science. If you can't replicate the experiment, it means the results don't hold, but it doesn't mean the investigators were bad people - and assuming they are is unlikely to get better science.