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buybuydandavis comments on This is why we can't have social science - Less Wrong
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Comments (82)
The amusing thing is that Mitchel's argument proves much more than he wants it to prove.
Notice that the above argument applies just as well to the original experiment being replicated.
Yes, noticed.
Has anyone read his entire article? Does he attempt any justification for why this particular argument doesn't equally apply to the original experiment?
One principle I try to keep in mind is "The other guy is probably not a total moron. If it seems that way, you're probably missing something."
I read it. He has a section titled "The asymmetry between positive and negative evidence".
His argument is that a positive result is like seeing a black swan, and a null result is like seeing a white swan, and once you see a black swan, then no matter how many white swans you see it doesn't prove that all swans are white.
He addresses the objection that this leaves us unable to ever reject a spurious claim. His answer is that, since negative evidence is always meaningless, we should get positive evidence that the experimenter was wrong.
I think this is a fair summary of the section. It's not long, so you can check for yourself. I am... not impressed.
Actually, it's like hearing a report of a black swan, which is why the burden of proof is generally put on the report.
It's even worse than that for him. What a bad analogy for him to rest his case on. Surely, the purpose of these social science studies is not to make a claim about the existence of some bizarre subset of the population (a black swan), but that the results will generalize to the population at large (all swans are black).
That's more than enough for me.
Thanks for taking the bullet for us.
There's a lot wrong with the argument; he has no actual justification for assuming that social science is anything like swan-spotting.
But even within his unjustified analogy... apparently if someone reports a new color of swan in Australia, he might give polygraphs and vision tests to the reporter, but sending an expedition to Australia to check it out would be of no scientific value.