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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> n fact, the earlier studies on R.E.M. deprivation might not have been as compelling as they once seemed.

> In those earlier studies, researchers kept animals from going into R.E.M. sleep by waking them up. “In some experiments, they wake up the animals a thousand times a day,” Dr. Siegel said.

So much science that I used to take for granted is garbage.

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I think the problem is that society accepts results like this uncritically. I don't think this study was innately garbage, as waking the animals was the only way they could disturb rem sleep, but there should have been (maybe there were?) big caveats attached.

As a society we need to realize that studies are not "proof". The scientific process is more than just studies.

The actual papers probably did. News writeups are often much more sensationalized than the actual research abstract and conclusion. This PhD Comic describes it really well:

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

This article is actually fairly balanced in comparison to many of the other paper-based news write ups I've seen.

My favorite quote from a favored author, and former head librarian of the US Library of Congress:

"Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses."

Boorstin

-The Discoverers

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discoverers

It isn't the science itself, it's the conjecture built up around its popularization.

"We have two observations of X when Y"

"So Y causes X!"

"I didn't say that."

"Hey everyone! Y causes X, probably."

Quick, get your own Z, it helps prevent Y...

It is often valuable to question how you know what you know.

> Quick, everyone get your own Z, let's test whether it helps prevent Y... it might just work

better?

The text in italics was about people trying to cash in on the media exaggeration by selling bogus products based on the initial false assumption.

That's how it is. Don't be discouraged or disillusioned. The beauty of science is not that it gets things right, it's that it is always a little less wrong than before.

I many cases, the science is not talking about real proofs (in the mathematical sense) but marely about assumptions based on some (or many) indicators. Such "science" should not be part of the real science. The real sciense should contain ONLY the things which are proved with real proofs!

If that were true we'd be paralyzed by solipsism and skepticism. Sometimes you have to make do with a working hypothesis.

You can't eat mathematical proofs.

But that's the essential point, that what you call working hypothesis are actually untested hypothesis. Using an untested hypothesis as a working hypothesis is bad science that may actually be counterproductive, unbeknownst to the users of the working hypothesis.

You always depend on an untested hypotheses at some point. They are absolutely unavoidable.

Here's a very simple example:

- How much testing is sufficient? For example, as far as we can tell the laws of physics don't vary over time scales that we can directly observe. This has been true as far as we can tell.

- So far so good: the hypothesis that 'the laws of physics don't change' has been 'tested'. Next question: is that amount of testing sufficient?

- Well, that seems to be an untestable proposition; it's always philosophically possible that things get pulled out from under your feet, and no amount of testing up to time T lets you know with complete certainty what happens for t > T.

Go even one or two steps deeper, and you quickly find yourself resting on either unfounded, untested, or untestable assumptions.

That's diverging from what was being discussed and creating a strawman that you are now debunking. The context is the use of method-less science that uses assumptions based upon indicators as working hypothesis - not that there are always base assumptions but that the refutation of testing while holding assumptions up as tested is something that is bad science.

I thought what was being discussed was:

"The real sciense[sic] should contain ONLY the things which are proved with real proofs!"

As in mathematical proofs. You can't prove most things the way you can in mathematics, which is rock-solid through tautologies and self-consistent abstract models. When you are observing actual reality you have to make some assumptions.

What was being discussed was the reply in the context of my comment that had been replied to. I was not the original GP poster. Sorry, if I didn't make that clear.

As opposed to doing nothing because of some kind of epistemological catch-22? How do you plan to start with a tested hypothesis, as opposed to an untested hypothesis? How did you test it before you conceived it?

It's not an ideal solution but it's a practical inevitability to make some assumptions to get things moving. The best of us come back and check the assumptions as soon as they are able to quantify them and perform an empirical experiment, and as a backup we have others independently verifying people's assumptions by trying to replicate experiments and seeing if the predictions line up.

Nobody has magic powers to divine truth from nothing. Science is a filter which gradually strains out the misinterpreted and the biased and the just-plain-wrong, but it still starts with subjective observation and reasoning. As does all human experience. The important part is that it moves away from that instead of stopping there.

But this is not possible because the scientific method is based on inductive, rather than deductive reasoning. Once you get into deductive proofs, you're not doing science anymore. You're doing maths.

You are describing the anti-intellectualism movement. We wouldn't have many of the conveniences of today with that type of thinking.

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