Playing the science game.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Borrowed from:
Playing by the Rules
Harriet Hall
Volume 33.3, May / June 2009 Skeptical Inquirer.

If you want to play the science game, here's what you do:

1. Submit your hypothesis to proper testing. Testimonials, intuitions, personal experience, and "other ways of knowing" don't count.
2. See if you can falsify the hypothesis.
3. Try to rule out alternative explanations and confounding factors.
4. Report your findings in journal articles submitted to peer review.
5. Allow the scientific community to critique the published evidence and engage in dialogue and debate.
6. Withhold judgment until your results can be replicated elsewhere.
7. Respect the consensus of the majority of the scientific community as to whether your hypothesis is probably
true or false (always allowing for revision based on further evidence).
8. Be willing to follow the evidence and admit you are wrong if that's what the evidence says.

If you want to play the science game, here are some of the things you don't do:

1. Accuse the entire scientific community of being wrong (unless you have compelling evidence, in which case you should argue for it in the scientific journals and
at professional meetings, not in the media).
2. Design poor-quality experiments that are almost guaranteed to show your hypothesis is true whether it really is or not. Use science to show that your treatment works, not to ask if it works.
3. Keep using arguments that have been thoroughly discredited. (The intelligent design folks are still claiming the eye could not have evolved because it is irreducibly complex; homeopaths are still claiming homeopathy cured more patients than conventional medicine during nineteenth-century epidemics).
4. Write books for the general public to promote your thesis—as if public opinion could influence science!
5. Form an activist organization to promote your beliefs.
6. Step outside the scientific paradigm and appeal to intuition and belief.
7. Mention the persecution of Galileo and compare yourself to him.
8. Invent a conspiracy theory
(Big Pharma is suppressing the truth!).
9. Claim to be a lone genius who knows more than all scientists put together.
10. Offer a treatment to the public after only the most preliminary studies have been conducted.
11. Set up a Web site to sell products that are not backed by good evidence.
12. Refuse to admit when your hypothesis is proven wrong.

[Psi Wavefunction]

Damn, the dark side seems more fun!

Not to mention helluvalot easier...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Damn, the dark side seems more fun!

Not to mention helluvalot easier...

"The Dark Side clouds everything." [/little froggy guy with hairy ears]

[AshtonBlack]

Damn, the dark side seems more fun!

Not to mention helluvalot easier...

"The Dark Side clouds everything." [/little froggy guy with hairy ears]

"Never underestimate the POWER of the dark side of the force!" [/ugly bloke in a hooded robe and an asthmatic tall chum]

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Damn, the dark side seems more fun!

Not to mention helluvalot easier...

"The Dark Side clouds everything." [/little froggy guy with hairy ears]

"Never underestimate the POWER of the dark side of the force!" [/ugly bloke in a hooded robe and an asthmatic tall chum]

I'll take the Jedi to win. Fifty bob.

[AshtonBlack]

Damn, the dark side seems more fun!

Not to mention helluvalot easier...

"The Dark Side clouds everything." [/little froggy guy with hairy ears]

"Never underestimate the POWER of the dark side of the force!" [/ugly bloke in a hooded robe and an asthmatic tall chum]

I'll take the Jedi to win. Fifty bob.

18 gold sovereigns on the blokes with the cool powers! (dark side, obviously....)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

18 gold sovereigns on the blokes with the cool powers! (dark side, obviously....)

"Hate sells, but love is better for repeat business."

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The complete article.

[lsdetroit]

this wonderful life was brought to you in part by: The Scientific Method, making life easier and creating endless luxuriess while being hastely over-looked every day.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

this wonderful life was brought to you in part by: The Scientific Method, making life easier and creating endless luxuriess while being hastely over-looked every day.

You can always tell when some people have been trying to figure out something scientific, there are two sooty patches above their ears.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Damn, the dark side seems more fun!

Not to mention helluvalot easier...

A powerful Sith you will become. Henceforth, you shall be known as Darth... ..Crascuits.


(By the way, WTF are Crascuits?)

[lsdetroit]

this wonderful life was brought to you in part by: The Scientific Method, making life easier and creating endless luxuriess while being hastely over-looked every day.

You can always tell when some people have been trying to figure out something scientific, there are two sooty patches above their ears.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Image2.jpg (60.67 KiB) Viewed 2673 times

[Psi Wavefunction]

Once upon a time before I knew what Scientology was, I actually thought it'd have something to do with 'science' because of the name. That was around middle school.

I mean, BURN, scientific method, BURN! [/Darth Crascuits]

[FBM]

I'll trust science when they resolve the problem of induction.

The final paragraph:

If we accept the analysis of inductive reasoning sketched above, it may seem that Hume as done something remarkable and disturbing. He has shown that from a strictly intellectual point of view, there is no real difference between common sense and science on the one hand, and religious belief on the other. In all three cases we find a system of belief based on a fundamental conviction that cannot be justified by argument. The most dramatic way to put the point is to say that Hume has shown that common sense and science are matters of faith. Hume would resist this attempt to rehabilitate religion by "softening up" our picture of common sense and science. The faith that Hume defends is a faith that we cannot possibly avoid or resist, a faith that renders skeptical doubt utterly idle. The religious case is very different, at least on the face of it. What we shall have to ask, as we proceed, is whether this difference really makes a difference.

(emphasis mine)

I'll be learnin' up on how to read tea leaves. It's a lot quicker and no partial differentials to screw with...