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I agree completely with what you wrote, but wanted to add something, which is a comparison between reactions to the Bem ESP study and work on the EM Drive (https://www.space.com/40682-em-drive-impossible-space-thrust...). At some level, both of these are ostensibly bullshit. The ESP study results fly in the face of all known physical laws, but so do the EM Drive results. In the former case, you might say that the scientific method is obviously flawed, or that psychology isn't a science; in the latter case, though, you say "someone presented anomalous results that need to be explained," but we don't question the scientific process or physics as a science. This is even though in both cases, anomalous results were presented, people expressed disbelief in the results, and a lot of time and energy were spent trying to explain the anomalies. I think of both of them as akin to scientific illusions or magic tricks, where an anomalous result is observed, that is so astonishing, but in which a lot of explanations that immediately come to mind can be ruled out initially, and people spend a lot of time coming up with more satisfying explanations. The Bem study has not really ever been accepted as evidence of ESP in psychology. What it led to were a lot of sophisticated discussions about Bayesian versus frequentist inference, and study design. If the response were to just dismiss things with handwaving as not being "real science" I think none of that discussion about Bayesian inference would have been gained. In the same way, I think it's safe to say that something has been learned about engineering phenomena, even if relatively minor, by studying the EM Drive. Science as it is practice is deeply flawed, because, as you say, humans are flawed. But another issue I think is that science, even when it isn't flawed, is very unpredictable and often harder than it seems. It's not just that a lot of flawed theories were once accepted scientific positions, it's also the case that a lot of currently accepted positions were once seen as lacking in evidence or even preposterous. The hubris and gatekeeping that accompanies a lot of modern science is counterproductive not only because it's naive and disingenuous, but also because in many ways it shuts down systematic discussion, which constitutes the scientific process itself. |