Meehl’s Philosophical Psychology - by Ben Recht - arg min

The ouroboros of discovery and justification - Why it’s necessary to account for psychological and social factors when assessing scientific evidence.

See What We Want to See - The context of discovery in experimental outcomes. Why some labs consistently find things others don’t.

Asystematic Reviews - The context of discovery in the scientific literature. Why we can only glean a partial view of the scientific landscape from papers.

An Iteration Between Theory and Practice - Theories are never true, just reasonably true. They can be patched in the light of falsifying evidence. The example of the kinetic theory of gasses.

Boundary Conditions - Patching theories by predicting new observations. Understanding that there is only so much you can include about the universe before you run out of compute. Long derivation chains with too many free parameters run out of use value.

Les Atomes - Perrin’s arguments for the existence of atoms. How explaining the same thing thirteen different ways counts as a “damned strange coincidence.”

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