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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Including this one?

Generally, no. The article was published in PLoS Med, and concerns generally medical research studies. It has been more than 10 years and i think most people still don't disagree with it. Here is the authors response to criticisms:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1297555/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1896210/

Just for clarification, am I correct to assume that this mainly applies to research conducted in the medical field then?

Yes, in other fields its even worse. Soft sciences are not even rigorous...

Can you elaborate as to why? Snark is not really the goal here.

> Can you elaborate as to why?

How can I elaborate on answer that I don't have?

I think just your first post is a snappy reply to the headline, but doesn't seem to address the content of the paper in any way, so I was interested in your specific thoughts about the content of the paper.

It's a perfectly valid, and indeed important question.

Self-application is an important form of scientific methodology. Think e.g. of programming languages development: one of the first things you do is bootstrap a compiler.

You're conflating science publishing philosophy with standard software development?

Programming language development is not standard software development.

PL research is a discipline with no really feasible empirical methods for robust and replicable evaluation of programming language ideas. Using self-application is a test of internal coherence -- if your new language is not good at writing a compiler, then maybe it isn't such a good idea.

Self-application is a well-known scientific methodology. Would you trust a physical theory that predicted the impossibility of physicists?

Since I've seen this paper mentioned a few times now on several different sites and heard varying replies, I'd be very interested in informed opinions about this. I've taken a look at it but don't consider my skill level in statistics high enough to assess the paper on my own.

Isn't this just applying a model (i.e. it's not empirical, just theoretical)?

If this publication is false, its premise is true, which would mean the publication is true?

This sentence is false.

Only Gödel can save us now.

I think it is more like "This is not a sentence."

If this publication is false, it's premise may or may not be true, which means we don't know anything.

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