EHeller comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Vaniver 04 September 2013 05:02AM

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Comment author: EHeller 08 September 2013 11:31:57PM *  9 points [-]

The problem is that most scientists seem to still be taught from textbooks that use a Popperian paradigm, or at least Popperian language

I'm willing to bet most scientists aren't taught these things formally at all. I never was. You pick it up out of the cultural zeitgeist, and you develop a cultural jargon. And then sometimes people who HAVE formally studied philosophy of science try to map that jargon back to formal concepts, and I'm not sure the mapping is that accurate.

they're used to publishing papers that use p-value science even though they kinda know it's wrong, etc.

I think 'wrong' is too strong here. Its good for some things, bad for others. Look at particle-accelerator experiments- frequentist statistics are the obvious choice because the collider essentially runs the same experiment 600 million times every second, and p-values work well to separate signal from a null-hypothesis of 'just background'.