I feel this would be very necessary for the general idea of an archive of refuted research to be effective. I say this primarily because even in the science and engineering domain (with which I am more familiar, as opposed to medicine and the soft sciences) there are many degrees of possible wrongness. When a field is just opening up, it is inevitable and even okay for people to pulish things that are a bit wrong. We know that the Cosmological Constant isn’t “right” but we don’t call Einstein’s original papers “refuted.”
Someone may say, “That’s fine, we will only put research that is meaningfully refutable in this archive,” but then you invite endless argument about whether string theory is refutable, etc., not to mention providing a platform for researchers with vendettas and ulterior agendas to invalidate the research of rivals through sheer nitpicking and willful misrepresentation.
Someone may say, “That’s fine, we will only put research that is meaningfully refutable in this archive,” but then you invite endless argument about whether string theory is refutable,
That’s why I mostly just concentrated on medicine, where you can simply ask whether replication studies on “thing X helps people” manage to reproduce the original result or not. Yes, there’s room for interpretation and disagreement even here, but hopefully less than for “is string theory refutable”.
I feel this would be very necessary for the general idea of an archive of refuted research to be effective. I say this primarily because even in the science and engineering domain (with which I am more familiar, as opposed to medicine and the soft sciences) there are many degrees of possible wrongness. When a field is just opening up, it is inevitable and even okay for people to pulish things that are a bit wrong. We know that the Cosmological Constant isn’t “right” but we don’t call Einstein’s original papers “refuted.”
Someone may say, “That’s fine, we will only put research that is meaningfully refutable in this archive,” but then you invite endless argument about whether string theory is refutable, etc., not to mention providing a platform for researchers with vendettas and ulterior agendas to invalidate the research of rivals through sheer nitpicking and willful misrepresentation.
That’s why I mostly just concentrated on medicine, where you can simply ask whether replication studies on “thing X helps people” manage to reproduce the original result or not. Yes, there’s room for interpretation and disagreement even here, but hopefully less than for “is string theory refutable”.