Comment by jraph
14 hours ago
> Both are evidence-backed simplifications
Which evidences do we have for this asker-guesser thing? Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works. There's a freaking meta analysis finding we don't have strong enough evidence. This is pseudo science. It could be discovered later that this stuff indeed works, but we don't know yet. It's a sexy topic, the lack of any convincing publication for all this time makes this pretty unlikely.
> Yes.
Ok, I'm done here.
If you don't see how an internet comment from a random person and a proper paper written by Newton (or even by a random scientist) are fundamentally different when it comes to robustness and reliability of the described knowledge, even accounting for all the flaws scientific publishing has, I don't see how this discussion can be productive any longer. This won't lead to anything interesting.
I think I've written everything I had to write on the topic, several times. I'll leave you with your pub / armchair science. You do you.
> Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works.
Sure it does. Data is actually plural of anecdotes. That's how most actual research started. The difference between "science" and "armchair science" of this kind is a matter of degree.
Anecdotes is already a plural, of anecdote. Data is not a plural of anecdotes, or anecdote, it is plural of datum (kinda, data is often used as a mass/uncountable noun, in which case it's not a plural).
Under which hypothesis (formulated before the observations), how you collect it and its statistical significance and then how you interpret it (guided by the hypothesis) are key.
Such data is nothing like anecdotes. Anecdotes are at best inspirations to formulate hypotheses.
Intuition is a core element in research (it guides the formulation of hypotheses) but doesn't constitute evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method