xkcd #3117: Replication Crisis
Title text:
Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn’t enough–maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: xkcd.com/3117/
tal@lemmy.today 1 hour ago
I liked once reading an article that showed that with some major findings from important scientists that were later shown to have a wrong value, it wasn’t that a second study promptly “snapped” to the correct values. Instead, over time, subsequent studies incrementally moved to the right value.
On one hand, this is good in that the process does ultimately work, and we got to the right value, though it could take quite some years.
On the other hand, this is embarrassing, because it suggests that people doing follow-up studies to a prestigious person second-guess their own results (“Doctor So-and-So can’t possibly be wrong…it must be me in error”) and aren’t willing to report the full deviation, so they’ll bang on an experiment until they get a value that isn’t that far off and report that.
I can’t seem to find reference to it in the explainxkcd Wikipedia articles, but I remember being intrigued.
Bustedknuckles@lemmy.world 2 minutes ago
The most famous version of this might be Millikan’s oil drop experiments to measure the mass of an electron. His notebook is full of qualitative judgments of his measured values and which ones to include in the final determination. The mass of an electron settled down pretty smoothly