People have no idea which sciences are robust
arstechnica.com
People have no idea which sciences are robust
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Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#2Physics and chemistry are pretty robust, everything else is far squishier. It's pretty easy to get identical atoms or molecules or subatomic particles. It's much harder to grow a field of identical plants or raise hundreds of identical mice.
Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#3People have no idea what science is
Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#4I really wish "data" journalism did a better job of conveying uncertainty. It is incredibly common to see comments like such-and-such increased 10%, without any comment on what the number of such-and-such actually was or if the 10% change was statistically significant. Likewise journalists often make claims that are not supported by the research. Scientists don't have the reach to describe their results to the public, news organizations need to do a better job of conveying the results accurately.
Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#5Physics and chemistry are pretty robust, everything else is far squishier. It's pretty easy to get identical atoms or molecules or subatomic particles. It's much harder to grow a field of identical plants or raise hundreds of identical mice.
It's also harder to do things to plants and mice, much less humans, without knocking them so far out of balance that it ceases to be a meaningful experiment.
Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#6People have no idea what science is
Okay, what is science?
Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#7Physics and chemistry are pretty robust, everything else is far squishier. It's pretty easy to get identical atoms or molecules or subatomic particles. It's much harder to grow a field of identical plants or raise hundreds of identical mice.
It's also harder to do things to plants and mice, much less humans, without knocking them so far out of balance that it ceases to be a meaningful experiment.
That's a strong statement. I'd say it 'ceases to be trivially interpretable'. And I think this is part of where the 'the published paper said ___ so it must be true!' disparity between scientists and public becomes more apparent.
In biology when you design a good experiment, run it, come up with a model that fits your experiment, no scientist would ever pretend that their articulated model was how things actually worked. It's close, it's reasonable, but many more publications would be needed to confirm it. A single publication just is not enough to decomplexify the entanglements in biology. Many other scientists will use that model as the basis for their newer experiment, and when their results do not comport, they alter, adjust, or if need be, discard the original model.
The trouble with biology is it might take an entire 'Cell' paper (12 pages of dense publication - ie, many many grad-student-years of work) just to come up with the most simplistic model for what the biological experiment observed. That doesn't mean it wasn't meaningful - it was just much more complicated and less easily well-describable than physics and chemistry experiments. But very much like physics and chemistry, there is a definite trend towards a well-described and predictable system. Models actually get increasingly accurate over time. And this feature might be part of the border in defining a 'robust' science.
Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#8Physics and chemistry are pretty robust, everything else is far squishier. It's pretty easy to get identical atoms or molecules or subatomic particles. It's much harder to grow a field of identical plants or raise hundreds of identical mice.
Agreed, from a Physicist's perspective, Darwin's Theory is extremely "squishy".
Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust
#9Ironically, polling and association studies like this would be something I'd classify as low precision.