{"id":1503,"date":"2008-03-02T08:45:19","date_gmt":"2008-03-02T06:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/2008\/03\/02\/how-to-do-better-research\/"},"modified":"2008-03-02T09:03:32","modified_gmt":"2008-03-02T07:03:32","slug":"how-to-do-better-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2008\/03\/how-to-do-better-research\/","title":{"rendered":"How to do better research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There is an interesting new dissertation (&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ontos-verlag.de\/Buchreihen-ES-978-3-938793-51-0.php\">Ulrich Frey. Der blinde Fleck<\/a>. Kognitive Fehler in der Wissenschaft und ihre evolutionsbiologischen Grundlagen&#8221;) that contains a nice game<\/p>\n<div>{democracy:5}<\/div>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<br \/>\nscroll<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uni-giessen.de\/philosophie\/frey\/homepage.htm\">Frey<\/a>, this test is being done now for 40 years with most people answering &#8220;E&#8221; or &#8220;E&#8221; &#038; &#8220;4&#8221;.<br \/>\nOnly 5% come up with the correct answer of &#8220;E&#8221; + &#8220;7&#8221; &#8211; the only solution that is able to falsify it. The rule is being false with &#8220;E&#8221; and an unequal number or &#8220;7&#8221; and a vowel &#8211; also known as the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wason_selection_task\">Wason Selection Task<\/a>.<br \/>\nSo here is rule #1: The research outcome can be greatly improved by active attempts to falsify a hypothesis. Take care as confirmatory results can be memorized up to 3 times better than falsifying data. Frey cites <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Psychology-Judgment-Decision-Making\/dp\/0070504776\">Plous<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThus over a wide range of situations, perceptions of risks were strongly biased in the direction of preexisting views &#8230; Conservatism is the tendency to change previous probability estimates more slowly than warranted by new data.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We usually do not want to spent too much time on such boring tasks like falsifying an hypothesis &#8211; creating something new is certainly more rewarding. As children we learned that often the first hypothesis generated is already satisfactory; daily life questions are frequently solved by a simple answers &#8211; while science questions are completely different. So we need to remain sceptical and falsify, falsify, falsify -will be continued tomorrow-<\/p>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"bottom-note\">\n  <span class=\"mod1\">CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 10.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is an interesting new dissertation (&#8220;Ulrich Frey. Der blinde Fleck. Kognitive Fehler in der Wissenschaft und ihre evolutionsbiologischen Grundlagen&#8221;) that contains a nice game {democracy:5} &nbsp; CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 10.04.2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1726],"class_list":["post-1503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-of-science","tag-falsification"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}