| > You mean like Einstein did with the theory of relativity? Oh. Wait. That was only proven 30+ years later by Ives–Stilwell. You're registering agreement with my point. Or didn't you notice? No one accepted relativity until it was confirmed by experiment. > You mean like String Theory is completely proven to the exclusion of alternatives? Oh. Wait. It isn't. Notwithstanding its popular name, string theory is not a scientific theory, it's a conjecture without an empirical basis. > Science observes, formulates hypotheses, and then falsifies or shows them to be true. Yes to the first, no to the second. Science never proves anything true, only false. This idea was perhaps best expressed by philosopher David Hume, who said, "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion." > The "linked artice" is journalism, not science. So science journalism is free from the responsibilities of science itself? If that were true, it wouldn't be either possible or responsible to call it science journalism. > Ah. You digested 35 years of research, and found no evidence? Or you skimmed the overview I provided, and chose to not further investigate? There is no demonstrated cause-effect relationship, it's a correlation. If there were evidence for a cause-effect relaitonship, it would have been included even in the popular accounts. > You didn't read any of the papers, did you? This is what you think constitutes scientific debate? If the evidence existed, you would be linking to it rather than arguing in bad faith. > Yes, there is no clear mechanism, yet. That's because we don't understand psychology well enough to always define clear mechanisms. That's what science is about - furthering our understanding. Psychology isn't science, and until it tries to explain what it has until now merely described, that status won't change. > The metastudies indicate that research is doing a decent job to control for other factors, and still reproduces nicely. If reproducing unexplained results constituted science, astrology would be a science. |