Comments on: The Theory Of Theories.

By: Sam

Sam — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 19:47:47 +0000

Wait, chemistry leads to scientific method, which leads to biology and physics. Brainhurt.

By: aosher

aosher — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 09:26:13 +0000

Huh, why does scientific method lead to communism? Never thought about that before.

By: Gap

Gap — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 21:49:21 +0000

Also, don’t trust the Scientific Method. The Scientific Method leads to Communism. Don’t want that.

By: Sam

Sam — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 14:18:19 +0000

Measuring people’s preferences is difficult because people often aren’t sure what they want themselves, or else will lie to pollsters (a typical one was where people said they’d vote Labour in 1992, but didn’t want to be taxed higher so voted Conservative instead). This is a problem in selling products, because you’re never sure of the best price point until you try and see whether people buy at that price. People may say “I’ll buy that!” until they have to actually spend money, at which point they’re like “eh”.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:06:26 +0000

Excellent article thanks!

As Josh says, it’s obviously applicable outside of Science (or Science is more applicable to things that aren’t necessarily science). It’s not a hard concept to understand, but lots of people don’t really take it on board.

As you say, it’s not just people who do humanities at university. They are just as capable of understanding and using the principles of the scientific method as scientists are of not or misusing it.

Also – not the best Holmes! Does Jeremy Brett have an MBE for it like Vasily Livanov does? No, didn’t think so.

By: LifeofZenith

LifeofZenith — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:26:17 +0000

You’ve gracefully left out the bit when scientist turn human and ego and deliberately and on purpose try to destroy each others theory/work.It’s just not science and tea party…

I know of one anecdote where in Italy archeologists threw fake stone into a field at night so that by morning the other team would “hopefully” pick up their stones, and the the carbon dating would have given false dates on the find – thwarfing some theory about human migration. (I am still searching for the paper, it’s fairly old, supposed to have happened in ’50s or so)

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 12:27:14 +0000

Political polling can almost seem like black magic at times. I remember during the 2010 election the BBC had a guy from (I think) Ipsos Mori on who had done exit polling that showed the Lib Dems had done nowhere near as well as their high of 30-odd points after the first debate had indicated. The BBC presenters were somewhat incredulous, but as the night wore on it became obvious that the Lib Dems had only made marginal gains despite their previous high poll position. Ipsos Mori guy had correctly predicted this, but every other poll up until that point hadn’t which seemed to me to point towards a flawed methodology. Of course I know nothing about political polling so I have no idea what really happened there.

By: aosher

aosher — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 12:09:48 +0000

Interesting. A lot of what you say here can be cross-applied to other things, like political polling.