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Eugene comments on Confusion about science and technology - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: NancyLebovitz 23 October 2013 12:27PM

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Comment author: Eugene 24 October 2013 08:23:02AM 0 points [-]

I'm not involved in any science fields so for all I know this is a thing that exists, but if it is, it isn't discussed much: perhaps some scientific fields (or even all of them?) need an incentive for refuting other peoples' experiments. As far as I understand it, many experiments only ever get reproduced by a 3rd party when somebody needs it in order to build on their own hypothesis. So in other words, "so-and-so validated hypothesis X1 via this experiment. I have made hypothesis X2 which is predicated on X1's validity, so I'll reproduce the experiment before moving forward".

What if there was a journal dedicated to publishing research papers whose goal is purely to invalidate prior experiments? Or even more extreme, a Nobel prize in Invalidation? Could some fields be made more reliable if more people were put to the task of reproducing experiments?