RobinHanson comments on Science Isn't Strict Enough - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 May 2008 06:51AM

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Comment author: RobinHanson 16 May 2008 11:43:19AM 3 points [-]

Science only demands that you notice an anvil dropped on your head.

This isn't fair - the Science ideal has higher and more difficult standards than this. Recall this aneqdote:

To keep himself honest, Riley would give a colleague the exact value of a key parameter, and himself use this value with noise added in. Only when he had done all he could to reduce errors would he ask for the exact value.

When a hundred mistakes can screw up your experiment, it is damn hard to try to fix them all without using them as excuses to get the result you "expect."