[GeekyBear]

> true evidence needs to be verifiable

Scientific evidence needs to be repeatable.

If others perform the same experiment, they should get the same experimental result.

Once you start exploring the views of individuals and groups, you're more in the realm of the social sciences than hard science.

[gumby]

> > true evidence needs to be verifiable

> Scientific evidence needs to be repeatable.

I think the GP comment had it right.

Consider I make some cosmological prediction based on Bob’ observational data (“stars with this spectrum mostly contain elements X and Y”). It does little good to repeat my analysis, which is entirely done on a piece of paper or in a computer program.

But Alice could say, “Well if that’s true, then this other thing would have to be true too” and go check that.

That’s the difference between “verifiable” and “repeatable”.

Sometimes “repeatable” is a sensible form of verification. Last year we spent 9 months trying to reproduce results from an important (to us) paper. Eventually we came up with a reliable process to reproduce the results of the paper — the hypothesis was correct — but it looks like the author just saw some signal a few times, and didn’t really demonstrate the principle they were trying to validate. We couldn’t use the same process described in the paper.

Since we can now get the result whenever we want we consider the theory valid.

[throwawaymaths]

> Scientific evidence needs to be repeatable

This isn't even true. Suppose a supernova happens and you gather a bunch of data. That's not really repeatable.

Same goes for lots of things in evobio. Clinical reports of one-off events, etc.

[pixl97]

Supernovas go off all the time, we would not use them as a standard candle if the did not.

If you gather a bunch of data on that supernova, you have evidence that supernova exploded. You don't have data on the nature of supernovas until you capture a wide range of them.

[throwawaymaths]

I apologize, I'm not claiming that no aspect of supernovas is observed more than once!

But so if you see something particularly unusual about that supernova (which happens a lot), it might be non reproducible, and you just have to live with that fact.

For example, multimodal observation of gravitational waves is still n=1

[pixl97]

But most of these things are expected to be 'reproducible' given a long enough observation frame. For example when LIGO comes back online I expect we'll see more multimodal observations of grav waves soon enough. And the galaxy is filled with trillions of stars so over time the likelihood of equivalent behavior approaches 1. Most of these things are just chemistry following the entropy curve.

When 'intelligence' is involved it can be a little more tricky as we tend to pull some tricks that seemingly violate entropy at least on a local scale (that is systems at the local scale can become more ordered), which means it can take a lot of effort to the thermodynamic path a system took to get into its current configuration.

[throwawaymaths]

Are they? Do we expect to see another "wow" signal?