[Retric]

> The scientific method is about EXPERIMENTS

IMO the model of that story is the S at the end of experiments is more than just repeating the same things. Fixing the carburetor was the second and vastly more informative experiment, but your friend could have tried various alternatives to doing exactly what he was doing which would then uncover the time component.

Science digs into problems, so the most important part of meta analysis, which is often ignored, is asking if the question even makes sense in a generic context. Just as crucial is narrowing down the effect size which may be dwarfed by random noise in some experiments etc.