this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
51 points (87.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35316 readers
1091 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

With the proviso that it depends how you define the scientific method...

One strength is it gives us a reasonably reliable way to investigate and share information, moving slowly forward with problems even though the people working on them might never meet, or even be alive at the same time.

A major downside is that (at least most popular versions of the scientific method) are designed to look at population level tendencies. And depending on the design and scale of these studies it can erase genuine differences. Let say we take a 50 people with skin rashes and give them some antifungal cream. For the vast majority of people this doesn't help, and so our study shows that it's an ineffective treatment for rashes. If we'd found a group of 50 people with rashes caused fungal infection, it would have been a highly effective treatment. So, if that's the extent of our knowledge of rash treatments we would dismiss claims that antifungals "really helped me" as quack anecdotes.

Obviously, this is the process of investigation and refinement that is part of the science. But in the interim period, when working with things that we know we do not fully understand, we have to be careful to not over privilege "scientific evidence". In a relatively new field, if one approach has "good evidence" and others don't, this doesn't mean they are necessarily less effective. They might just be less amenable to experimental designs that allows for their effectiveness to be shown, or they are effective for a specific subgroup that hasn't been clearly identified yet. (obvs, this is not meant to be taken to say any woowoo bullshit 'could' work, but that there's a whole messy middle between those two extremes.)