The social side of science seen in the research on programming language quality
At the very end of this grand tour:<p>&gt; Science has its problems, but it’s still the best we got.<p>I would agree <i>if</i> you&#x27;re doing particle physics and looking for p &lt; 0.0000003 then absolutely.  Science is a great tool for the kinds of investigations of the natural world which can be understood by science.  If you&#x27;re doing social science by scraping some data from the internet and looking for p &lt; 0.05, that&#x27;s a very different story.<p>I&#x27;m not actually sure what aspect of this qualifies as &quot;science&quot;, besides using p-values to analyze the data.  Even if all the categorization and sampling and analyses were perfect, it&#x27;s using commit messages and known bugs with known fixes, all of which are essentially self-reported.