Brent: you gave me a quiet hour with your question of the difference between 10^-5 and 10^-10
I have a low opinion about statistics, since it can change if you alter the borders within which you count the countable units. Experiment ditto, depending on the development in measuring/processing instrumentation. Then comes the 'real stuff': how much do we know at all? yesterday, today, tomorrow? The 'positive' results are temporary, replication is dependent on our ongoing techniques and whatever we accept as justified is suspect. Probability? you sure? your last sentence is suspect: it is easy to "overlook" something we absolutely don't know about and that is "most of it" even the qualia of those. Have a good day John M On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 6:26 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 6/9/2014 7:38 AM, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: > >> I thought this blog post and the ensuing comments were a fascinating >> perspective on the increasing problem of medical science not replicating. >> >> "The Control Group is Out of Control" >> http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ >> > Trying to set up placebo science would be a logistical nightmare. You’d >> have >> > to find a phenomenon that definitely doesn’t exist, somehow convince a >> whole >> > community of scientists across the world that it does, and fund them to >> study >> > it for a couple of decades without them figuring out the gig. >> > >> > Luckily we have a natural experiment in terms of parapsychology – the >> study >> > of psychic phenomena – which most reasonable people don’t believe exists >> > but which a community of practicing scientists does and publishes >> papers on >> > all the time. >> > >> > The results are pretty dismal. >> > > A big part of the problem is that theories are being tested just by > experiment and statistics. This happens in parapsychology and to a lesser > degree in medicine because there is no established background of theories > that the new theory must mesh with. For comparison look at how the > Tronnies theory is treat on this forum. No one asks how many positive > results have been replicated. They ask does it conserve energy-momentum; > because if it doesn't then it has already been falsified by an enormous > background of experience. You can try to quantify this by the Bayesian > prior, "What's the probability conservation of energy-momentum is wrong.", > but it's hard to say what the difference is between 10^-5 and 10^-10. And > when you get to such small probabilities it becomes likely there is some > more significant effect that you've simply overlooked. > > Brent > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
