Sunday, September 29, 2019

Of Brittle and Broad Theories, and Science...



….I responded with my view that all these theories are either vague enough to be adaptable to any data or precise enough to be evidently false with no data collection needed. This was what Lakatos noted: any theory is either so brittle that it can be destroyed by collecting enough data, or flexible enough to fit anything. This does not mean we can’t do science, it just means we have to move beyond naive falsificationism.

                           — Andrew Gelman at end of a post on his blog a short while back


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