Slashdot Mirror
Bloggers Put Scientific Method To the Test
ananyo writes "Scrounging chemicals and equipment in their spare time, a team of chemistry bloggers is trying to replicate published protocols for making molecules. The researchers want to check how easy it is to repeat the recipes that scientists report in papers — and are inviting fellow chemists to join them. Blogger See Arr Oh, chemistry graduate student Matt Katcher from Princeton, New Jersey, and two bloggers called Organometallica and BRSM, have together launched Blog Syn, in which they report their progress online. Among the frustrations that led the team to set up Blog Syn are claims that reactions yield products in greater amounts than seems reasonable, and scanty detail about specific conditions in which to run reactions. In some cases, reactions are reported which seem too good to be true — such as a 2009 paper which was corrected within 24 hours by web-savvy chemists live-blogging the experiment; an episode which partially inspired Blog Syn. According to chemist Peter Scott of the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, synthetic chemists spend most of their time getting published reactions to work. 'That is the elephant in the room of synthetic chemistry.'"
What's wrong with slashdot is pedants like you who not only aren't getting it, but refusing to consider the possibility that there's something you aren't getting.
Testing whether the previous tests have captured flaws that could easily be found by bloggers IS a test of the practical effectiveness of the scientific method, using the scientific method. Even if in principle the platonic ideal of the scientific method hasn't been tested, the actual reality is being tested.
More abstractly, there's no problem testing the scientific method with the scientific method. If the test using the scientific method says that the scientific method fails very often, then you definitely have a problem. If it says that you don't, then you may or may not have a problem depending on whether there's a flaw in the scientific method that the scientific method cannot itself detect. Which is okay because the scientific method itself is often about testing a hypothesis and believing it on the basis of how many times people fail to disprove it. Any further than that is an epistemolgy discussion.