Unfortunately negative results don't get published as much as they should
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Everyone in science I've ever met agrees there should be a Journal of Stuff That Didn't Work
I like to export the failing onto other people, though.
gravity doesn't really care who tries to disprove it, they still go splat.
Having your findings disproven isn't failing though right? You still added to the body of knowledge because we know more stuff. I'm not a scientist though so I could be wrong. Pseudoscientists add nothing and just do harm though.
No work is wasted if it gives a clearer picture of something. Even if you get disproven, it just means that you found one of the dark parts of the picture. Now sure, people mostly remember the ones that discover the brighter parts of the image. But the whole picture is still made of both the dark and bright parts. We don't just need to know what works, we also need to know for sure what DOESN'T work. Or else we'll never know the real bounds of something.
Now if you don't mind, i'll go back to slamming my head against analysis.
Slammed! Also cool metaphor.
It's not a failure in the usual sense we think about it, no. You were still "technically wrong" in whatever hypothesis you had that was disproven. But the end result is different because theoretically everyone involved cares more about the answer being found, not necessarily that they are the one to do it.
Hell, in cases where whatever you did was later proven incorrect it's usually that whatever you did was the most correct answer for the information we had at the time. Then new information is discovered and often someone else builds off what you did to get this new answer.
Theoretically yes, but in practice, negative results don't usually get published. People don't want to fund negative results. Every fu ding agency is always chasing novelty, and impact. Our scientific community is actually kind of bad with actually doing science. We are lucky if we get negative results widely known these days.
I'll keep saying it. Let's have a journal system for negative results and replication studies. Give partial credits for it relative to journal papers with novelty.
So if you have an idea you can search there, see if someone has tried it and failed, and how they failed. You can also search a certain paper and see if people have replicated the study.
It'll help everyone immensely.
If all is being done on the up and up, nobody's got an agenda to push, they're actually doing science: no. Doing an experiment, publishing results, and then having your peers replicate your experiment and be unable to reproduce your results is not failure. In the words of Adam Savage, "It's not 'my experiment failed,' it's 'my experiment yielded data.'" But also, if one scientist gets a result and no one else does, the real thing we learn might be in finding out why.
REPEAT is a part of the scientific process.
Don't forget about the third category: "Your research results are hurting my feelings and therefore wrong! Cancel you!"
Or "your research results will hurt my profits, this media campaign will slander your credibility. We'll do our own research, with blackjack and hookers, and bribed results"
Or “my research is true because of conspiracy theories”
For example, a friend of mine ran a study that disproved a company's study that they used to push a product. Then my friend's company got blacklisted by the first company for all future products.
I found god, disprove that betas!
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Have you read the bible?? Absolute proof 😎
Proof for what is the question.
Proof that high resolutions do not exist? Huh, did not see that one coming.
You can tell that this image did not actually come from God because it is not 640x480x16.
God works in mysterious ways...
Elves, trolls, orcs, dwarves, ents and hobbits are real! It says so on the holy book: The Lord Of The Rings.
You have the right energy but the wrong book, join my book club, the one and only true book club!
Do you guys have a new true book per week or is it more of a true book a month club?
It's not a set schedule, every now and again someone from the club decides that we don't know how to read correctly and opens up a new book club with his own version of the book, which is of course not the one true book.
I don't know.
The whole thing sounds like it will lead into fights amongst true book clubs because the members of each will think theirs is the true book, not the other ones, and the fights might even be worse between the true book clubs that were originally the same. I all sounds kinda dangerous.
Plus, how would I know if the book of your true book club is in fact the one and only true book if there are other true book clubs which like you book also claim to have the one and only true book and its a different book?
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Have you ever seen the history of science? Left is absolutely not true to the point that we’ve had to wait for powerful scientists to die to get the progress they’ve held back entered to record.
This doesn't disprove their meme. What it is saying is still true. Those scientist you mention held back progress and couldn't be "real scientists"
I feel like there's a term for that sort of thinking...
No True Scotsman? That could be true if the image is merely descriptive of our messy reality.
I see the image as including a prescriptive message that states an ethical ideal: a real scientist should welcome their findings challenged, even refuted, because the goal is truth. Science excels by dispelling falsehoods. That seems right. (It could use some alt text, though.)
in b4 "if by whiskey" 😄
Could it be the phenomenon we also see in areas such as Engineering were as people get more senior most transit into more managerial positions, where the mindset is a lot more about managing appearances and stakeholders, and saying the right things at the right time to the right people rather than the far more "it is as it is" mindset of those on the technical side?
I actually started by going into Science at Uni but ended up switching to Engineering half way on my Degree (not many jobs for Experimentalist Physicists in my homeland) so never actually saw the actual Science career track from the inside through the eyes of somebody with enough professional experience to see the more subtle things about it, so I am genuinely curious if the Science career too has the phenomenon I see in Engineering of Senior people tending to be more Administrator/Manager and less Technical hence with more tendency to manage the subjective perception of reality of others to achieve personal and career goals and less of a desire for things to be as clear and as objective as possible.
Because if it is so, it would explain how many such well established older Scientists seem to be less Scientist in the sense of this meme - because they are less Scientist and have become more Administrator, and the latter has a whole different mindset.
You got it. It has been my experience as well.
Yeah, the right is how science unfortunately works. My professor told me that science progresses one death at a time. We argued in various papers that the terminology in our field was really messy and didn't hold up to actual findings, but the old generation of scientists didn't want to allow any changes. In most research fields there are a few scientists that hold a position of power and that don't like sharing that power.
Reading Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and her idea of an anarchist world caught me off guard when she starts exploring exactly this problem in science...
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Meanwhile, Higher Education research be like:
- publishes good quality research on the efficacy of an advising methodology
- immediately gets ripped to shreds by professors from schools using other advising methods
- academic advising will never be a career due to the lack of consensus
Ideally? Yes
But a modern scientific environment puts a lot of pressure to present your results better than they really are.
It damages good science a great deal
if someone cared enough about my research to even replicate it let alone disprove it I'd be losing my shit
I'll find it and put it on your doorstep.
What’s it about?
Eric Weinstein has left the chat in tears.
*If you challenge my ~~feelings~~ profits, I'll sue.
We need to push more for good science because a lot of times there is a ton of pressure to produce research and go along with the current established theories instead of being able to challenge them.
I really don't like this "no true scotsman" flavored meme, the profit incentive destroys valuable research by limiting resources to replications of past experiments (as soon as something is profitable, you must not disprove it for a fear of retaliation from companies promoting said something), this is systemic, not an individual level problem, get rid of "bad scientists" and more will be propped up.
I do like the sentiment of the meme though, more more replication is needed.
"boy i wish anyone bothered to even skim my paper to make sure i didn't make an obvious math error"
Mistress has failed more times than the student has had chances
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