[bchjam]

> No experiment could ever possibly hurt scientific knowledge

what about one with a falsified result?

fwiw I think convexity and understanding are relatively orthogonal, but how could one employ the former without the latter? However the author's position seems to be more that gaming systems works better than exploring their contexts. Sometimes you might make more money in less time, but the money is all you'll get out of it. In practice, maybe understanding and convex payoff functions are both useful at different scales.

[hannasanarion]

Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data. Experiments that Aristotle performed to demonstrate classical elemental theory are still valid and useful, his incorrect interpretation of the underlying mechanisms notwithstanding

[systoll]

You’re using a different meaning when you talk about falsifying a hypothesis.

From Oxford via https://google.com/search?q=falsify :

1. alter (information, a document, or evidence) so as to mislead. "a laboratory which was alleged to have falsified test results"

vs

2. prove (a statement or theory) to be false. "the hypothesis is falsified by the evidence"

[thaumasiotes]

> Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data.

Nonsense. Falsification of data happens all the time. But more importantly, falsification as applied to hypotheses and falsification as applied to data are two completely different concepts.

Falsification in the sense "we tried this, and got unexpected results, disconfirming our hypothesis" is something you do to hypotheses. This is Popperian falsification.

In the sense of what happens to data, falsification is "we tried this, and got data that disconfirmed our hypothesis. But instead of recording that data, we recorded spurious data which confirms our hypothesis". (Or, of course, "we didn't try anything, but here are some numbers that we feel reflect what would have happened if we had".) This is falsification in the same sense you'd see it applied to, say, accounting records.

[bchjam]

If someone knowingly uses bad data, aren't the claims supported by it false?

[yesenadam]

I thought Aristotle didn't do experiments.