Related papers: Two Wrongs Make One Right
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
A substantial school in the philosophy of science identifies Bayesian inference with inductive inference and even rationality as such, and seems to be strengthened by the rise and practical success of Bayesian statistics. We argue that the…
A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so…
Causal Learning has emerged as a major theme of research in statistics and machine learning in recent years, promising specific computational techniques to apply to datasets that reveal the true nature of cause and effect in a number of…
Causality is omnipresent in scientists' verbalisations of their understanding, even though we have no formal consensual scientific definition for it. In Automata Networks, it suffices to say that automata "influence" one another to…
In the 1980s an important goal of the emergent field of fractals was to determine the relationships between their physical and geometrical properties. The fractal-Einstein and Alexander-Orbach laws, which interrelate electrical, diffusive…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…
Many economic theories have been introduced over the course of history to articulate our understanding of the economy. Classical theories by Adam Smith and David Ricardo's Comparative Advantage have been foundational for the last century's…
Scientists in some fields are concerned that many, or even most, published results are false. A high rate of false positives might arise accidentally, from shoddy research practices. Or it might be the inevitable result of institutional…
The use of science for policy is at the core of a perfect storm generated by the insurgence of several concurrent crises: of science, of trust, of sustainability. The modern positivistic model of science for policy, known as evidence based…
This is a short, light spirited account of how some possibly important science actually happened. It very much conflicts with Popper's contention that the key to scientific progress is falsification.
To solve the probability problem of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, D.Wallace has presented a formal proof of the Born rule via decision theory, as proposed by D.Deutsch. The idea is to get subjective probabilities from…
In the book "String Theory and the Scientific Method", Richard Dawid describes a few of the many non-empirical arguments that motivate theoretical physicists' confidence in a theory, taking string theory as case study. I argue that…
Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in physics can be understood as a reflection of a deep and unexpected unity between the fundamental structures of mathematics and of physics. Some of the history of evidence for this is…
Anomalies drive scientific discovery -- they are associated with the cutting edge of the research frontier, and thus typically exploit data in the low signal-to-noise regime. In astronomy, the prevalence of systematics --- both "known…
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be…
It is mostly agreed that Popper's criterion of falsifiability fails to provide a useful demarcation between science and pseudo-science, because ad-hoc assumptions are always able to save any theory that conflicts with the empirical data…
According to Karl Popper assumptions are statements used to construct theories. During the construction of a theory whether the assumptions are either true or false turn out to be irrelevant in view of the fact that, actually, they gain…
Hardy's paradox was originally presented as a demonstration, without inequalities, of the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and the hypothesis of local causality. Equipped with newly developed tools that allow for a quantitative…
Promoting a theory with a finite number of terms into an effective field theory with an infinite number of terms worsens simplicity, predictability, falsifiability, and other attributes often favored in theory choice. However, the…