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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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…