Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

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>I don't agree that is technically falsified.

> I know you used "pretty strongly" as sarcasm, but it's not falsifiability is absolute - and this is not.

I'm having a very hard time parsing what you're saying. At this point, it looks like you're trying to make an argument that "falsifiability" must mean that it is both possible and practical to reject a hypothesis with 100% certainty, and if you can't then you're not doing science. Would you care to explain more clearly why the position you're taking is less extreme and absurd than that?

(Additionally, I did not use "pretty strongly" in any sarcastic way. I used it to acknowledge the possibility of confounding factors that I did not care to enumerate, which mean that even the experimental outcome of getting COVID-19 after inoculation with the homemade vaccine would not be a 100% certain rejection of the hypothesis that the vaccine conferred some protection against COVID-19. But if you're operating in a mindset of 100% certainty being achievable and necessary for science, then I can see how you would misunderstand me.)

My point was to back up the grandparent.

This is equally science as going into the woods, picking some berries and roots, grinding them and put them up your nose, doing an antibody test, and writing your conclusions up in a blog post. There's no difference.

(But, yes, I think that writing hypotheses with 100% falsifiability, before challenging them practically, is quite a good definition of "scientific method", based on Karl Popper's work. You can compare with what Wikipedia has to say.)

Edited to respond to your edit: The word falsifiability is deliberately used to distinguish that we are talking about False, the Boolean state. The confounding factors are important - the confounding factors here mean I can't prove it False; there are no circumstances whereby the author has to accept that their hypothesis was False.

> (But, yes, I think that writing hypotheses with 100% falsifiability, before challenging them practically, is quite a good definition of science)

It seems like you're still not making the necessary distinction between whether it is possible for an experiment's outcome to falsify the hypothesis, vs whether it is guaranteed that the experiment will falsify the hypothesis if it is in fact wrong. The latter is an unreasonable requirement to make part of your definition of science.

> there are no circumstances whereby the author has to accept that their hypothesis was False.

The author described such a circumstance, but then explained that he did not have access to the necessary lab testing to actually do so. The hypothesis is falsifiable in principle even if the researcher does not expect to have the equipment necessary to measure falsification by that outcome.

(I should clarify that I don't mean the author's opinion is important to falsifiability)

> The author described such a circumstance, but then explained that he did not have access to the necessary lab testing to actually do so.

In the parent article? Could you quote that part?

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