Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Science is an ongoing race between our inventing ways to fool ourselves, and our inventing ways to avoid fooling ourselves

--- Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist, quoted in How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop, Nature News October 7,2015

Context

“People forget that when we talk about the scientific method, we don't mean a finished product,” says Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Science is an ongoing race between our inventing ways to fool ourselves, and our inventing ways to avoid fooling ourselves.” So researchers are trying a variety of creative ways to debias data analysis — strategies that involve collaborating with academic rivals, getting papers accepted before the study has even been started and working with strategically faked data.