Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Wednesday, 4 November 2015

How scientists avoid fooling themselves.

"“People forget that when we talk about the scientific method, we don't mean a finished product,” says Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Science is an ongoing race between our inventing ways to fool ourselves, and our inventing ways to avoid fooling ourselves.” So researchers are trying a variety of creative ways to debias data analysis — strategies that involve collaborating with academic rivals, getting papers accepted before the study has even been started and working with strategically faked data."

Excellent, thorough article.
http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-and-how-they-can-stop-1.18517?WT.mc_id=GOP_NA_1510_NEWSFHOWSCIENTISTSFOOLTHEMSELVES_PORTFOLIO

5 comments:

  1. I think AGW proponents are guilty of all the Fallacies and avail themselves to none of the Debiasing Techniques.

    The article also mentions transparency, a problem at the CRU and NOAA.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jordan Henderson What happened to your post about the NOAA refusing to hand over data ? It seems to have been deleted.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rhys Taylor I delete posts sometimes. I feel they've had all the interaction they are going to get and they are just an attractive nuisance for trolls.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ... pretty sure there's something ironic about deleting posts about transparency... :D [/trolling]

    ReplyDelete
  5. Rhys Taylor yeah, I thought about that.

    Of course, unlike the NOAA and CRU Scientists I don't have a commitment to Scientific transparency.

    ReplyDelete

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