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buybuydandavis comments on This is why we can't have social science - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.