RE: I don't owe you anything... You may form a gang and take it by force, but that still does not mean I OWED it.
"I very much believe in the tool known as the scientific method. If people use it and follow it then I consider that science. Many so-called scientists these days use it when it is convenient and ignore it when it is not."
I've noticed that the trend today is to simply goal-seek studies by attempting to commission the groups most likely to come up with the result you want. If you do not get the result you want, you disown the study, bury it if possible, and recommission it with another group under new criteria that will confirm the result you want.
Once you finally get the result you want, you can claim that the study followed a correct scientific method and was unbiased. Technically, the study didn't cherry-pick any data, (the proverbial) you simply cherry-picked what studies you were going to deem valid.
It's a worrying trend. Censorship of the real, in general, is getting more and more skillfully executed.
I agree. There is another aspect of that which is troubling. For the scientific method to truly work we need to know about failures as well as successes. Failures can be nearly as important to the process. In fact, if we don't know of failures we likely have a lot of repeat studies being done all over the place which is highly inefficient.
"Failures can be nearly as important to the process."
I think scientists might often remove the world nearly here.
Yep. :) I almost did. Then I thought. Once they succeed there technically are no more failures on that exact subject. Yet there will be new failures on trying new things. So since success was reached that's why I put nearly in there. That was my thought process.
Good point. It's hard not to argue the "one combination to the lock" isn't more valuable than any single faulty combination.