[extropy-chat] A Bayesian Looks at Climate Change

[Martin Striz]

On 4/20/06, Neil H. <neuronexmachina at gmail.com> wrote:

> I also recall another example, where there was a famous physics or chemistry
> experiment which measured some sort of experimental value. For several years
> after the experiment, experiments by other labs could be roughly modeled as
> a (moving?) Gaussian with a mean around the original measurement. This
> continued for some time, until someone with more confidence in their
> apparatus finally published a new figure, and the cycle repeated, with
> following experiments gravitating around the new figure.
>
> I think the idea was that if scientists got a value which was too different
> from what had been previously reported, and they weren't confident in their
> experiment, the values tended to get discarded and the experiment retried.
>
> Does anyone else recall hearing about this? I've tried some googling for it,
> to on avail.

Never heard of it, however the scientific community is rife with
exactly the opposite much of the time.  Scientists are in competition
over funding with others in their field, so they love nothing better
than to disprove their colleagues, rather than agree with them.  I
know anecdotally that scientists are much more critical of studies
published by their colleagues than of studies more generally.  There's
obviously room for subjectivity, but despite that, science has done a
good job of more closely approximating the truth.

Martin