Scientific Methodology Quotes

“There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Radionics was conceived as a diagnostic and treatment technology at a time when modern electronic theory and biomedicine had not become the dominant sciences they are today. Early radionic devices incorporated the new discoveries of radio and electronics into their design. During that period, the functional assumptions of radionic technology did not seem as implausible as it does today. However, it wasn't long before radionics became outmoded and completely non-scientific. As Mizrach has noted, radionics continued to appropriate the methods of orthodox science into its design and terminology, making the probability of understanding what it could accomplish even more difficult to assess. I will examine this appropriation in a spirit of tolerance, given the state of electronics and medicine circa 1910, when radionics was first discovered. I will do so in order to shift the focus of this interesting technology from the scientific to the metaphysical, where the reader not limited by a need for scientific approval can evaluate it. My aim is to provide a reasonable means of evaluating radionic technology as an artistic methodology.”
― Duncan Laurie, The Secret Art: A Brief History of Radionic Technology for the Creative Individual

“One recent case highlighted by Dan Simons relates again to the work of Yale psychologist John Bargh. In 2012, Bargh and colleague Idit Shalev published a study claiming that lonelier people prefer warmer baths and showers, thereby compensating for a lack of “social warmth” through physical warmth.44 In 2014, psychologist Brent Donnellan and colleagues reported a failure to replicate this finding—and not just in a single experiment but across nine experiments and more than 3,000 participants, over 30 times the sample size of the original study.45 Despite this failure to replicate, as well as the presence of unexplained anomalies in the original data, Bargh and Shalev refused to retract their original paper. In many other sciences, a false discovery of this magnitude would automatically trigger excision of the original work from the scientific record. In psychology, unreliability is business as usual.”
― Chris Chambers, The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice

“Beginning students of physics quickly become acquainted with idealizations like the notion of a frictionless surface, and with the fact that laws like Newton’s law of gravitation strictly speaking describe the behavior of bodies only in the circumstance where no interfering forces are acting on them, a circumstance which never actually holds. Moreover, physicists do not in fact embrace a reg ularity as a law of nature only after many trials, after the fashion of popular presentations of inductive reasoning. Rather, they draw their conclusions from a few highly specialized experiments conducted under artificial conditions. This is exactly what we should expect if what science is concerned with is discovering the hidden natures of things. Actual experimental practice indicates that what physicists are really looking for are the powers a thing will manifest when interfer ing conditions are removed, and the fact that a few experiments, or even a single controlled experiment, are taken to establish the results in question indicates that these powers are taken to reflect a nature that is universal to things of that type.”
― Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God

“In academia, the model that we are taught; that we are told in most fields - not the arts, and not the experimental sciences either - but many, many fields, [the model] is:

- You have an idea,
- You accumulate everything that anyone has ever written about that idea,
- You become familiar with what everyone has already said about it,
- And from there, you cobble together the pieces: the evidence either for or against your [idea], or you just review what they've done and you create something that's a little bit new.

Over in science space I call this "Brick in the Wall Science".

It's valuable that some people are doing Brick in the Wall Science but you will always have the same foundation of the house that you started with with Brick in the Wall Science, and it's possible the foundation of the house you started with is not the foundation that you want or that is true. [...]

[With Brick in the Wall Science] you can't have revolutionary ideas. You can't have paradigm shifts.”
― Heather E. Heying

“American academia has abandoned empiricism to make way for wokeism. This does not bode well. Science without empiricism is nothing but religion by another name.”
― A.E. Samaan

“If we take a science such as experimental physics, where studies tend to have high statistical power, methods are well defined and de facto preregistered, then the failure to reproduce a previous result is considered a major cause for concern. But in a weaker science where lax statistical standards and questionable research practices are the norm, attempts to reproduce prior work will often fail, and it should therefore come as no surprise that retraction is rare.”
― Chris Chambers, The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice

“An experimenter’s own biases, expectations and intentions, whether expressed knowingly and outwardly, or even held subconsciously, are known to influence certain experiments. This effect is so well known that it has a name: the ‘observer-expectancy effect’ or ‘experimenter effect’ and has itself been a topic of research.”
― Jon Noble, Natural Remote Viewing