Hacker News Reader

Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

If you replace math with (experimental) physics, you get an inductive framework, yet physics doesn't have the same problems psychology has.

View on HN

Does the behavior of a particle depend in part on every other experience the particle has had in the past? Physics has things that we can't figure out, and things that have to be observed in the aggregate, but it's much easier to perform multiple experiments with the same base conditions.

If we could clone the participants of a psychology experiment prior to the experiment, with their memories and personalities intact, we could possibly narrow the gap. Or maybe not! But that would be a fascinating finding! ;)

Physics has calculable observation biases baked in. At least you can create experiments where you knowingly limit those biases based on some serious fundamentals. All other fields have so much more to worry about, it really isn't fair.

I think one of the major reasons is that physicists actually understand math and statistics and from the first year of university learn how to design, run and analyze experiments properly and quantify uncertainty.

This is a big difference to humanities or even biology.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Fraud_alle... and the following section. Physics isn’t immune to it.

The fraud allegations are bogus (according to wikipedia). "Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology" is in itself a psychological study. Has this wikipedia source been peer reviewed and replicated? This is quibbling about fractions of a percent of the secondary measurement, the primary result being quite obvious quantization of electric charge. And! Ultimately the charge measurement result converged on the result known today within 10 years of his original experiment. That's what immunity looks like.

The replication crisis is not at all about some papers not being replicable or being fraudulent - the crisis is about the issue that in certain domains a huge proportion of the papers (e.g. half!) turn out not replicable and actually false.

I'd consider it appropriate to say that physics is indeed immune to replication crisis unless it turns out that a significant proportion (e.g. more than 5%, one order of magnitude less than for psychology) physics papers fail replication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com