Even if the community of inquiry is both too clueless to make any contact with reality and too honest to nudge borderline findings into significance, so long as they can keep coming up with new phenomena to look for, the mechanism of the file-drawer problem alone will guarantee a steady stream of new results. There is, so far as I know, no Journal of Evidence-Based Haruspicy filled, issue after issue, with methodologically-faultless papers reporting the ability of sheeps' livers to predict the winners of sumo championships, the outcome of speed dates, or real estate trends in selected suburbs of Chicago. But the difficulty can only be that the evidence-based haruspices aren't trying hard enough, and some friendly rivalry with the plastromancers is called for. It's true that none of these findings will last forever, but this constant overturning of old ideas by new discoveries is just part of what makes this such a dynamic time in the field of haruspicy. Many scholars will even tell you that their favorite part of being a haruspex is the frequency with which a new sacrifice over-turns everything they thought they knew about reading the future from a sheep's liver! We are very excited about the renewed interest on the part of policy-makers in the recommendations of the mantic arts...

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/698.html