If the results are not replicable, how can they be actionable?
We found that students participating in the "2hr active recess program" have meaningfully better health outcomes, psychological health outcomes, and better grades. It was tested faithfully in 25 schools over 10 years.
It expands to other places. Different countries. Different decades. Different people run it in different ways. The kids are different. In some cases, the kids are already so active that the extra activity is detrimental. In some places, it's really hot. Kids tend to read, or do more organized indoor activities.
Basically, the world is not a laboratory. You're not predicting the trajectory of a projectile, where unknowables can be quantified as a function. It's all 3 body problems all the time.
Yet, we as humans do manage to make sense of the world. We run schools, companies. We learn more about how to do those things. Formal studies are an important part of learning about how to do those things. Scientific mindset and methodologies are useful to this. It's a lot better than just philosophizing the whole thing. The type of knowledge we gain, OTOH, isn't like F=MA. It never will be.
The value of the above study does relate/imply to it containing knowledge. It's a partial knowledge of a general problem. It is not complete knowledge of a particular problem, like you would get in a lab. Neither lab experiments or wild studies tend to replicate in one another's world.
No matter how good the study, how many times it replicated, or how well it worked throughout the 80s and 90s... there's no guarantee that your program is working well or a guaranteed explanation for why it isn't.
Elucidating confounding variables and controlling for them is the entire fucking job of a scientist.
To your example, if they publish a paper that explicitly highlights that it worked well for sedentary kids with typical diets of X, Y, and Z in region Q, then it failing to be a found in other environments isn’t a problem.
It’s a problem when these clowns do a test on one specific group of 20 people and then generalize to, “doing X leads to Y in humans”.
The answer is absolutely not loosening up the constraints. It’s to keep lambasting people who generalize before anything has been reproduced widely.
Popper’s science is fine. Morons who don’t realize what they measured are the problem.
Many times the first or first few teams won’t know what the confounding variables are and subsequent research is needed to find them. They should still report their initial “hmm, that’s novel” findings even if it later turns out that it’s explained by confounding variables.
*-No true Scotsman
No. This is methodology. The job of a scientist is to advance scientific knowledge. This is as vague as it needs to be.
Popper didn't do science. He did philosophy. He also did a fine job of formalising methods, and abstracting the methods scientists were using into a Scientific Method. This scientific method is a great achievement and a wonderful, multipurpose probe. That does not mean it fits in all orifices. The job of a scientist is not to continue hammering until the probe fits.
I think it has to to be held out as a possibility that there is actually no science behind how we run schools and companies. One way this could happen is if non-scientific ideas simply overwhelm the ones that are grounded in good science.
The fact that it isn't like F=MA also means it will never advance beyond producing collections of amusing factoids that are unrelated to one another and potentially false.
It’s actionable by trying it in a new circumstance (set of parameters) and observing whether it fails - over and over. Failure doesn’t mean the claim is wrong/untrue, it means you’ve changed a parameter that happens to be important: now find it!
I agree that this is a generalization problem. I just don't believe that this particular way of describing it is helpful. If you'll allow me an apocryphal example, when Newton saw the apple fall, if he had generalized to "all things from apple trees fall at the same rate", he would have been correct for a while, then ludicrously incorrect once the leaves started blowing off in Autumn. If at that point he had tried to figure out exactly what kind of tree produces this gravity thing, or which parts of trees, we wouldn't be any further along than we were before.
Generalizations work along multiple axes. With some degree of imprecision, every experiment can be a success (or failure). This is why we have the scientific method in the first place.
Now, perhaps you're making the argument that this is somehow, for lack of a better term, half-science. It's not right, but it's not wrong either. It's truthy. The logical follow-up would be: ok, where is the second half? In this and many other cases there is no second half. Papers were published, people received awards, wrote books, became famous, and lots of other folks used their work. So even if somehow this is better than nothing, in practice I'm not seeing it.
I think framing it in this lens is helpful because it points toward a solution: capturing more of the parameters more explicitly and varying them more deliberately. If we just say, “oh x y z studies aren’t replicable, field [x y z] is bullshit,” we are ending our inquiry prematurely. We are ending it at the falsification of Newton’s initial theory and saying that because leaves fall at a different rate, that gravity doesn’t exist.
You're not going to find the parameter which makes a high school nutrition program deterministic. It shouldn't be the goal.
If you can’t find the parameters that make it reproducible, what value does it have in the first place?
Surely there is one, but it's maddeningly hard to pin down. Especially when the experiments are hard to perform and control properly, which applies both to psychology and astronomy.
Remember that scientists existed before philosophy of science, including formalisations of The Scientific Method. Darwin wasn't following the scientific method, the method followed him.
If you can't control parameters so that the results you are claiming are reproducible you are just publishing noise ?
Should a journal paper never be published until the field has established all the fundamental properties? How could it discover those fundamental properties without the publications?