Science isn't storytelling

Stuart Ritchie · 27 Dec 2022

Others here said this too

The replication crisis is not an aberration; many of the things we believe are wrong

Their wordsWe know how easily these practices can distort the scientific record and give us false-positive, nonsense results.

Also said by Nat Friedman

Read the piece on sciencefictions.org ↗

5 korrents from this piece ↓

Stuart Ritchie did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A scientific paper should not be built around a take-home message, because that invites cherry-picking and hiding the results that did not fit.

Their wordsThis, as was noted on Twitter, is a recipe for bad studies: it encourages the cherry-picking of results that went your way and the hiding of those that didn’t.
Our reading
The replication crisis is not an aberration; many of the things we believe are wrong

Their wordsWe know how easily these practices can distort the scientific record and give us false-positive, nonsense results.
Our reading
Deciding your conclusion before you look at the data is one of the most reality-distorting things a scientist can do.
Mental modelCognitive biases

Their wordsHaving a pre-existing conclusion—a “take-home message”—in mind is one of the most reality-distorting influences on our thinking.
Our reading
A scientific paper is a description of results, not a story.

Their wordsA scientific paper isn’t supposed to be a story.
Our reading
Compressing a piece of research into a journal paper's word count is itself a distortion of what was found.
Mental modelThe map is not the territory

Their wordsThe mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words—limited by a journal-imposed word count—is itself a distortion of reality.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.