Maybe. But to assume any of that, you would need additional knoweledge. In the real world, in an actual case, you might have checked that there are 19 other researchers who used the same approach and that they all hid their findings. Whatever that additional knoweledge is that’s allowing you to infer 19 hidden motivated researchers where only 1 is given, that is what gives you the ≈1% result.
I’m not inferring 19 more motivated researchers—that was just an example (the number 20 was picked because the standard threshold for significance is 5% which means one of out 20 researches that achieved this will be wrong). What I do infer is an unknown number of motivated researchers.
The key assumption here is that had the motivated researcher failed to meet the desired results, he would have kept researching without publishing and we would not know about his research. This implies that we do not know about any motivated researcher that failed to achieve their desired results—hence we can assume an unknown number of them.
The same cannot be said about the frugal researcher. If there were more frugal researchers but they all failed, they would have still published once they reached 100 patients and we would have still heard of them—so the fact we don’t know about more frugal researchers really does mean there aren’t any more frugal researchers.
Note that if my assumption is wrong, and in the other Everett branch where the motivated researcher failed we would have still known about his forever ongoing research, then in that case there really was no difference between them, because we could assign to the fact the motivated researcher is still researching the same meaning we assign to the frugal researcher publishing failed results.
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Consider a third researcher—one that’s not as ethical as the first two, and plans on cherry-picking his results. But he decides he can be technically ethical if instead of cherry-picking the results inside each research he’d just cherry-pick the researches with desirable results. His plan is to research 100 patients, and if he can cure more than 60% of them he’ll publish. Otherwise he’ll just throw scrap that research’s results and start a brand new research, with the same treatment but still technically a new research.
That third researcher is publishing results—it’s 70 cures out of 100 patients. We know about his methods and we know about these results—and that’s it. Should we just assume this is his only research and even though he intended to cherry-pick he happened to get this results on the first attempt, so we should treat them the same as we treat the frugal researcher’s results?
Note that the difference between the motivated researcher and the cheating researcher is that the cheating researcher has to deliberately hide his previous researches (if there are any) while the motivated researcher simply doesn’t now about his still researching peers (if there are any). But that’s just a state of mind, and neither of them is lying about the research they did publish.
Maybe. But to assume any of that, you would need additional knoweledge. In the real world, in an actual case, you might have checked that there are 19 other researchers who used the same approach and that they all hid their findings. Whatever that additional knoweledge is that’s allowing you to infer 19 hidden motivated researchers where only 1 is given, that is what gives you the ≈1% result.
I’m not inferring 19 more motivated researchers—that was just an example (the number 20 was picked because the standard threshold for significance is 5% which means one of out 20 researches that achieved this will be wrong). What I do infer is an unknown number of motivated researchers.
The key assumption here is that had the motivated researcher failed to meet the desired results, he would have kept researching without publishing and we would not know about his research. This implies that we do not know about any motivated researcher that failed to achieve their desired results—hence we can assume an unknown number of them.
The same cannot be said about the frugal researcher. If there were more frugal researchers but they all failed, they would have still published once they reached 100 patients and we would have still heard of them—so the fact we don’t know about more frugal researchers really does mean there aren’t any more frugal researchers.
Note that if my assumption is wrong, and in the other Everett branch where the motivated researcher failed we would have still known about his forever ongoing research, then in that case there really was no difference between them, because we could assign to the fact the motivated researcher is still researching the same meaning we assign to the frugal researcher publishing failed results.
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Consider a third researcher—one that’s not as ethical as the first two, and plans on cherry-picking his results. But he decides he can be technically ethical if instead of cherry-picking the results inside each research he’d just cherry-pick the researches with desirable results. His plan is to research 100 patients, and if he can cure more than 60% of them he’ll publish. Otherwise he’ll just throw scrap that research’s results and start a brand new research, with the same treatment but still technically a new research.
That third researcher is publishing results—it’s 70 cures out of 100 patients. We know about his methods and we know about these results—and that’s it. Should we just assume this is his only research and even though he intended to cherry-pick he happened to get this results on the first attempt, so we should treat them the same as we treat the frugal researcher’s results?
Note that the difference between the motivated researcher and the cheating researcher is that the cheating researcher has to deliberately hide his previous researches (if there are any) while the motivated researcher simply doesn’t now about his still researching peers (if there are any). But that’s just a state of mind, and neither of them is lying about the research they did publish.