>> But if you tweak the hypothesis just a little, the data suddenly confirm it
This is 'data mining' right? And I've occasionally wondered about this, since I don't work in a scientific field but did once make use of the scientific method for some research I did. And yes the findings weren't especially conclusive but I'm not sure I could've tweaked the hypothesis to make it work.
So, had I found something really interesting that didn't fit the hypothesis, is the 'right way' to conduct a new experiment from scratch? So say I did that, and used the 'tweaked' hypothesis, of course I'd find something interesting, because it's already there.
In this new 'pre-registration' framework, how can I correct the problem and pursue the interesting idea but keep the science in-tact? Because, if I used some sort of cross-validation at the outset and I have all the data available I presumably can't change the sample, so the hypothesis presumably has to change.
This is 'data mining' right? And I've occasionally wondered about this, since I don't work in a scientific field but did once make use of the scientific method for some research I did. And yes the findings weren't especially conclusive but I'm not sure I could've tweaked the hypothesis to make it work.
So, had I found something really interesting that didn't fit the hypothesis, is the 'right way' to conduct a new experiment from scratch? So say I did that, and used the 'tweaked' hypothesis, of course I'd find something interesting, because it's already there.
In this new 'pre-registration' framework, how can I correct the problem and pursue the interesting idea but keep the science in-tact? Because, if I used some sort of cross-validation at the outset and I have all the data available I presumably can't change the sample, so the hypothesis presumably has to change.