re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition i agree with everything that lee lady wrote in her previous post in this thread in case this puzzles people i would like to expand on two of her comments in article c jodh ig news hawaii edu lady uhunix uhcc hawaii edu lee lady writes avoiding mistakes is certainly highly desirable however it is also widely acknowledged that perfectionism is inimicable to creativity in the extreme case a perfectionist becomes so paralyzed by all the possible mistakes he might make that he is unable to even leave the house one of the most important and difficult aspects of reasoning about empirical investigation lies in understanding the context scope and importance of the various arguments and pieces of evidence that are marshalled for a claim some errors break the back of a piece of research some leave a hole that needs to be filled in and some are trivial in their importance it is a grave mistake to confuse these past snippets from this thread i doubt if einstein used any formal methodology he also proposed numerous experiments which if performed would distinguish a universe in which special relativity holds from one in which it does not back to lee lady these are not the rules according to many who post to sci med and sci psychology according to these posters if it s not supported by carefully designed controlled studies then it s not science these posters are making the mistake that i have previously criticized of adhering to a methodological recipe a carefully designed and controlled study is neither always possible nor always important on the other hand if someone is proposing a remedy that supposedly alleviates a chronic medical problem we have enough knowledge of the errors that have plagued this kind of claim to ask for a carefully designed and controlled study to alleviate our skepticism rules such as support the hypothesis by a carefully designed and controlled study are too narrow to apply to all investigation i think that the requirements for particular reasoning to be convincing depends greatly on the kinds of mistakes that have occurred in past reasoning about the same kinds of things to reuse the previous example we know that conclusions from uncontrolled observations of the treatment of chronic medical problems are notoriously problematic russell
