Science

Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in the 1870s made a big mistake throwing out their perfectly good “disease of deficiency” theory as soon as there were a few contradictory stories from polar explorers. Their mistake was thinking “maybe

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1. We asked students to test a specific hypothesis with a dataset: Is BMI related to number of steps? Other students were just asked to analyze the dataset. The students with a specific hypothesis were 3X less likely to see the gorilla in the data! https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-020-02133-w…

We’re taught to see splitting — coming up with weird special cases or new distinctions between categories — as a tactic that people use to save their pet theories from contradictory evidence. You can salvage any theory just by saying that it only works sometimes and not others…Scurvy isn’t the only case where splitting was the right call. Maybe

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