[Catalist] Towards an understanding of the nature of science: part 5 in the 4 part series you were taught at school

[Leon Harris]

Greetings all.
There is much angst in the scientific community over the "replication 
crisis", which is the observation that over half of the papers published 
in many disciplines cannot be reproduced by other researchers. ( see 
https://www.nature.com/collections/prbfkwmwvz/ for a balanced collection 
of views of this)

Much of the angst seems to be spurious, although it has been picked up 
by the purveyors of woo-woo ( "Pst little girl! Lemmme sell you a 
special crystal which will fix that socially fatal defect that you never 
knew you had 'cause I just manufactured it")  and followers of the New 
Age. (Except of course, that many of the original New age are now 
pushing 65 and onto the second boob job, and due to the need for 
effective medicine to treat the assorted heart and cancer ailments that 
go with older age have gained a greater respect for scientific approaches).

Here is an interesting paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences (PNAS) in which they enlarge and elaborate what we call the 
scientific method and view it from a broader perspective.

In this view, replication failure is treated as a mechanism to expose 
undeclared and hidden variables, and to create accurate models. They 
don't treat it as a flaw, just recognise that the process of gaining 
understanding is more complex than that taught at school.

To view the PNAS enlargement on this topic, head off down to
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/20/5042

Cheers,
Leon