What are the strengths of the scientific method? What are its weaknesses?

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• humorlessrepost@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Its strength is generating models of reality that have predictive power.

  Its weaknesses are a lack of absolute certainty and the inability to model that which has no detectable impact on reality. Though I don’t know of any alternative system that can demonstrably do either.

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  • onion@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also never touching any why-questions

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    • gregorum@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I don’t think this is true. “Why” questions merely need to be translated from the abstract to the tangible in order to be tested.

      Perhaps you meant the philosophical and/or metaphysical?

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    • humorlessrepost@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “Why”, when distinguished from “how”, is asking about the intent of a thinking agent. Neuroscience, psychology, and sociology exist. Am I misunderstanding your point?

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• Tolstoshev@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  P<0.05 means one in 20 studies are relevant just by chance. If you have 20 researchers studying the same thing then the 19 researchers who get non significant results don’t get published and get thrown in the trash and the one that gets a “result” sees the light of day.

  Thats why publishing negative results is important but it’s rarely done because nobody gets credit for a failed experiment. Also why it’s important to wait for replication. One swallow does not make a summer no matter how much breathless science reporting happens whenever someone announces a positive result from a novel study.

  TL;DR - math is hard

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  • notapantsday@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also, check out this one weird trick to get positive results almost every time: just use 20 different end points!

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  • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    P<0.05

    How might one translate this to everyday language?

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    • Tolstoshev@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      P<0.05 means the chance of this result being a statistical fluke is less than 0.05, or 1 in 20. It’s the most common standard for being considered relevant, but you’ll also see p<0.001 or smaller numbers if the data shows that the likelihood of the results being from chance are smaller than 1 in 20, like 1 in 100. The smaller the p value the better but it means you need larger data sets which costs more money out of your experiment budget to recruit subjects, buy equipment, and pay salaries. Gotta make those grant budgets stretch so researchers will go with 1 in 20 to save money since it’s the common standard.

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    • FilterItOut@thelemmy.club ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      To expand on the other fella’s explanation:

      In psychology especially, and some other fields, the ‘null hypothesis’ is used. That means that the researcher ‘assumes’ that there is no effect or difference in what he is measuring. If you know that the average person smiles 20 times a day, and you want to check if someone (person A) making jokes around a person (person B) all day makes person B smile more than average, you assume that there will be no change. In other words, the expected outcome is that person B will still smile 20 times a day.

      The experiment is performed and data collected. In this example, how many times person B smiled during the day. Do that for a lot of people, and you have your data set. Let’s say that they discovered the average amount of smiles per day was 25 during the experimental procedure. Using some fancy statistics (not really fancy, but it sure can seem like it) you calculate the probability that you would get an average of 25 smiles a day if the assumption that making jokes around a person would not change the 20-per-day average. The more people that you experimented on, and the larger the deviance from the assumed average, the lower the probability. If the probability is less than 5%, you say that p<0.05, and for a research experiment like the one described above, that’s probably good enough for your field to pat you on the back and tell you that the ‘null hypothesis’ of there being no effect from your independent variable (the making jokes thing) is wrong, and you can confidently say that making jokes will cause people to smile more, on average.

      If you are being more rigorous, or testing multiple independent variables at once, as you might for examining different therapies or drugs, you starting making your X smaller in the p<X statement. Good studies will predetermine what X they will use, so as to avoid making the mistake of settling on what was ‘good enough’ as a number that fits your data.

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  • Grunt4019@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I feel like this applies more to flaws in how studies are published and the incentives surrounding that more than the scientific method.

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• Contramuffin@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Researchers here. The scientific method is unbelievably tedious. Way more tedious than you would think. So much so that people are willing to pay researchers to do it for them. A simple yes or no question takes weeks or months to answer if you’re lucky.

  But the upside is that we can remove our own biases from the answer as much as possible. If you see an obvious difference between any 2 groups, then there’s little to no point in doing the scientific method. But if the difference is less clear, like borderline visible, then biases start to creep in. Someone who thinks there’s no difference will see the data and think there’s no difference. And someone who thinks there’s a difference will look at the data and think there’s a difference. The scientific method excels in these cases, because it gives us a relatively objective way to determine if there is a difference or not between 2 groups

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• PP_BOY_@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I bet your science textbook will tell you 😉

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• bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Pros:

  • Allows us to predict the future and understand reality

  Cons:

  • Only works on falsifiable hypotheses
  • Relies on peer review and replication which are pretty dead
  • Requires a basic understanding of math in order to understand why it works

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• meco03211@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Weakness: despite its simplicity, it’s still way too complicated for some of the troglodytes to understand. So now we have to contend with the idiots believing in a flat earth and that climate change isn’t real.

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• emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It is, in cases where it works, probably the best available method we have for finding the truth.

  But there are a lot of questions it cannot answer, it can still give the wrong result just by chance, and the results are only as good as the assumptions you made. The last point is particularly important, and can allow bias to creep in even when all the experiments are done correctly.

  Finally, real scientists often do not (and sometimes cannot) follow the scientific method perfectly, due to all sorts of reasons.

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• Acamon@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  With the proviso that it depends how you define the scientific method…

  One strength is it gives us a reasonably reliable way to investigate and share information, moving slowly forward with problems even though the people working on them might never meet, or even be alive at the same time.

  A major downside is that (at least most popular versions of the scientific method) are designed to look at population level tendencies. And depending on the design and scale of these studies it can erase genuine differences. Let say we take a 50 people with skin rashes and give them some antifungal cream. For the vast majority of people this doesn’t help, and so our study shows that it’s an ineffective treatment for rashes. If we’d found a group of 50 people with rashes caused fungal infection, it would have been a highly effective treatment. So, if that’s the extent of our knowledge of rash treatments we would dismiss claims that antifungals “really helped me” as quack anecdotes.

  Obviously, this is the process of investigation and refinement that is part of the science. But in the interim period, when working with things that we know we do not fully understand, we have to be careful to not over privilege “scientific evidence”. In a relatively new field, if one approach has “good evidence” and others don’t, this doesn’t mean they are necessarily less effective. They might just be less amenable to experimental designs that allows for their effectiveness to be shown, or they are effective for a specific subgroup that hasn’t been clearly identified yet. (obvs, this is not meant to be taken to say any woowoo bullshit ‘could’ work, but that there’s a whole messy middle between those two extremes.)

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• ArseAssassin@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Here’s a great article published yesterday on how science seems to be fueling the meaning crisis: bigthink.com/…/why-science-must-contend-with-huma…

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• boyi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  strength is it’s replicable. Not just somebody claiming something without justifying it can happen.

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  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is totally false in practice.

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    • boyi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How is this incorrect? In which field? And how do confirm you the validity of your methodology?

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• Liz@midwest.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Weakness: complete overkill for most of the problems in your life.

  Weakness: better done in advance, before you even realized you needed that knowledge to solve some other problem.

  Weakness: Immediate cash rewards unlikely.

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• QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Weakness: not usable for quantum physics/mechanics, etc where the outcome changes when the experiment is observed.

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  • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That's not true. The observation just becomes part of the experimental design, you can still make predictions about the outcome.

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    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s the debate now isn’t it.

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• 31415926535@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Been thinking about how quantum physics are connected to chaos theory and the properties of closed dynamic systems.

  Will spare you that. Part of it is the human mind doesn’t have the processing of all configurations, all the possible states of an entire systems, simultaneously.

  Humans do have abstract thought, critical thinking. We can observe, record data, notice patterns, trends. By chaos theory, humans discovered they could write math equations to describe the behavior of complex systems. With quantum physics, humans trying to figure out how localized realities in a system related to the behavior of system as a whole.

  We use scientific method because we can’t comprehend the infinite. Math equations are shorthand, a trick we use to make up for our shortcomings. Science and math is awesome.

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• Rolando@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Some good answers here already. Here’s a useful relevant article with more info: plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/

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