Eliezer, speaking of "privileging the hypothesis," what do you think about the proscription in statistics against "data dredging," or using past data to support post hoc hypotheses suggested by the data? What do you think about the view of descriptive science being inferior to hypothesis-driven science?

Based on your analysis, it would indeed seem that a hypothesis that could be located prior to an experiment might be more probable than a hypothesis that could only be located after an experiment.

Yet is there an over-emphasis placed on the state of mind of the particular experimenter prior to data collection? What if another scientist on the other side of the world had a hypothesis, which our original experimenter only came to after doing a study looking at something else. Can the second scientist say that the study confirms his hypothesis (because he held it in advance), while the first scientist cannot (because he only came to his hypothesis after doing the study)?

What if the post-hoc-hypothesized effect is very strong and related to plausible mechanisms in the field? What if it showed up in lots of previous studies that were looking at other things?

EDIT: Non-Eliezer people are invited to reply to this comment also.