That didn’t mean that I chose celibacy until the peer-reviewed literature could show me an optimised mate-finding strategy, of course, but it does mean that I don’t pretend that guesswork based on my experience is a substitute for proper science.
Guesswork based on your experience isn’t supposed to be a substitute for science. It’s the part of science that you do when choosing which phenomena you want to test, well before you get to the blinding and peer review.
The flip side is that proper science isn’t a substitute for either instrumental rationality or epistemic rationality. Limiting your understanding of the world entirely to what is already published in journals gives you a model of the world that is subjectively objectively wrong.
I don’t disagree but a potentially interesting research area isn’t an elephant in the room that demands attention in a literature review, and limiting yourself to proper science is no sin in a literature review either. Only when the lessons we can learn from proper science are exhausted should we start casting about in the folklore for interesting research areas, and we certainly shouldn’t put much weight on anecdotes from this folklore. In Bayesian terms such anecdotes should shift our prior probability very, very slightly if at all.
Guesswork based on your experience isn’t supposed to be a substitute for science. It’s the part of science that you do when choosing which phenomena you want to test, well before you get to the blinding and peer review.
The flip side is that proper science isn’t a substitute for either instrumental rationality or epistemic rationality. Limiting your understanding of the world entirely to what is already published in journals gives you a model of the world that is subjectively objectively wrong.
I don’t disagree but a potentially interesting research area isn’t an elephant in the room that demands attention in a literature review, and limiting yourself to proper science is no sin in a literature review either. Only when the lessons we can learn from proper science are exhausted should we start casting about in the folklore for interesting research areas, and we certainly shouldn’t put much weight on anecdotes from this folklore. In Bayesian terms such anecdotes should shift our prior probability very, very slightly if at all.