scientific research

If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries — you should stick with it in the face of apparent contradictions, at least for a while. When you hit a snag with a reliable theory, think “maybe it’s complicated” instead of “oh it’s wrong”. It may

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Lots of theories have been tried, and lots of them have been given up because of something that looks like contradictory evidence. But the evidence might not actually be a contradiction — the real explanation might just be slightly more complicated than people realized. Go back and revisit scientific near-misses, maybe there’s a wrinkle they didn’t

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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…