Comment by spott
5 days ago
This depends on what you are trying to figure out.
If you are talking about cosmology? Yea, you can look at existing data in new ways, cause you probably have enough data to do that safely.
If you are looking at human psychology? Looking at existing data in new ways is essentially p-hacking. And you probably won’t ever have enough data to define a “universal theory of the human mind”.
> If you are looking at human psychology? Looking at existing data in new ways is essentially p-hacking.
I agree that the type of analysis is important, as is the type and quality of the data you're analyzing. You can p-hack in cosmology too, but it's not a quality argument there either.
> And you probably won’t ever have enough data to define a “universal theory of the human mind”.
I think you're underestimating human ability to generalize principles from even small amounts of data [1]. Regardless, my point was more specifically that we could use existing data to generate constraints to exclude certain theories of mind, which has definitely happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding