rb1957, as my favorite physicist and bongo drum player wrote
"In summary,
the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your
contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that
Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about isn't just
a matter of not being dishonest, it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be
added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature, If
operated at another temperature, they all will - including Wesson oil. So it's the implication that has been
conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your
experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with
your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good
reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work.
And it's this type of integrity,
this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult
science.
...
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One
example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an
answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the
viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan.
If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little
bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are
ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: when they got a number that
was too far above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason
why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard, And
so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that, We've learned these tricks
nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease - we hope.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves - of having utter scientific integrity - is , I'm
sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope
you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have
to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have
to be honest in a conventional way after that.
...
I'm talking
about a specific, extra type of
integrity that requires bending over backwards to show how you maybe wrong, a
kind of integrity you ought to have when acting as a scientist. This is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to
other scientists, and I think to laymen as well."
Read the whole thing at
TLDR you need to discuss why you might be wrong, which is a level of self-skepticism I have rarely seen (arse covering-I can't actually think of any) in any climate related papers, and never in the pop media summaries.
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376