Jun 30, 2021 04:43 PM
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/06/2...sychology/
INTRO: We hear a lot about the “replication crisis” in science, and it’s often cited to imply that science is largely untrustworthy, perhaps just as fallible a “way of knowing” as, say, religion. And indeed, a number of prominent results in psychology and other fields have not been replicated by others. What is not mentioned in such criticisms is the huge number of studies in “hard” science that have been replicated. As far as I know, DNA is still a double helix, Jupiter is larger than Earth, benzene has six carbon atoms, and the continents are moving about on tectonic plates. Nobody, of course, has totted up the proportion of all results in any field that have been replicated. Still, failures of replication are concerning, but also inevitable, since science is an ongoing process. And they also give us a way of adding or subtracting credibility from a hypothesis.
A list of “replication failures” does serve to remind us that science is fallible, an ongoing enterprise that is subject to revision. Nothing is “proven” in science; the concept of “proof” is for mathematics, where there’s no “replication crisis.” Science is a Bayesian enterprise, in which accumulating evidence combines to give us more or less confidence in a hypothesis. But remember, too, that many scientific “facts” are very unlikely to be overturned, and, using any reasonable layperson’s notion of “proof”, have been proved. A molecule of normal water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, the normal form of DNA is a double helix, the speed of light in a vacuum is 299792458 metres per second ( roughly 186,000 miles per second) and so on.
This list of “reversals” below is limited to psychology and is 18 months old. It comes from the site argmin gravitas, and was compiled by “Gavin, a PhD candidate in AI at Bristol.”... (MORE)
Reversals in psychology
https://www.gleech.org/psych
INTRO: We hear a lot about the “replication crisis” in science, and it’s often cited to imply that science is largely untrustworthy, perhaps just as fallible a “way of knowing” as, say, religion. And indeed, a number of prominent results in psychology and other fields have not been replicated by others. What is not mentioned in such criticisms is the huge number of studies in “hard” science that have been replicated. As far as I know, DNA is still a double helix, Jupiter is larger than Earth, benzene has six carbon atoms, and the continents are moving about on tectonic plates. Nobody, of course, has totted up the proportion of all results in any field that have been replicated. Still, failures of replication are concerning, but also inevitable, since science is an ongoing process. And they also give us a way of adding or subtracting credibility from a hypothesis.
A list of “replication failures” does serve to remind us that science is fallible, an ongoing enterprise that is subject to revision. Nothing is “proven” in science; the concept of “proof” is for mathematics, where there’s no “replication crisis.” Science is a Bayesian enterprise, in which accumulating evidence combines to give us more or less confidence in a hypothesis. But remember, too, that many scientific “facts” are very unlikely to be overturned, and, using any reasonable layperson’s notion of “proof”, have been proved. A molecule of normal water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, the normal form of DNA is a double helix, the speed of light in a vacuum is 299792458 metres per second ( roughly 186,000 miles per second) and so on.
This list of “reversals” below is limited to psychology and is 18 months old. It comes from the site argmin gravitas, and was compiled by “Gavin, a PhD candidate in AI at Bristol.”... (MORE)
Reversals in psychology
https://www.gleech.org/psych