[From Bruce Nevin (990508.1748 EDT)]
Bill Powers (990508.1010 MDT)--
I refuse to stand in the middle while people complain to me about each
other. Settle your own fights. I'm not that Third Party.
The authority is not Bill. The authority is not Rick. The authority is a model that behaves like the organism being modelled.
You have every right to be annoyed at me for saying this. I have produced no models to test. It is an aphorism with no authority whatsoever.
But while I'm talking (I'll shut up soon)--I was moved by Feynman's discussion of integrity in science, in the last chapter of _Surely You're Joking_, which I've just finished rereading. It reminded me of things you've said, Bill, about the need to be very imaginative and creative in thinking up alternative explanations.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourselves--
and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be
very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself,
it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to
be honest in a conventional way after that.
His account of rat-running by Young in 1937 is worth a quick read. Young identified many things that needed to be controlled in order to run a sound experiment (for example, the rats could remember how the floor sounded under the corridor next to the door that had food, so he had to put the apparatus in sand), and subsequent neglect of his findings, so that years of research were so sloppy (by his standards) as to be useless, but nobody had realized that.