Asimov was wrong

[eirias]

Isaac Asimov reputedly once said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'" I'm sure he's right that new discoveries are often signaled by this phrase, but those breakthroughs account for only a small proportion of the times you hear it uttered. The rest of the time, it merely heralds stupid mistakes, like, you know, having labelled your data wrong. Unexpected and bizarre correlations popping out of your item analyses? Variables commingling in most unseemly ways? Check your labels before you pronounce your results destined for either Science or the dustbin. ;)

Comments

[rms10.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. Dude, I'm living your pain.

A professor told me that only about 10% of what you do ever gets published, and then another professor chimed in and said that they really freakishly good people publish maybe 15% of what they do.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the sympathy, guys. :) Actually, it's not so bad - the big problem was when I realized a few months back that my stimuli were way messier than I had noticed before, which put us in danger of having unusable results. Basically what I was trying to do in this experiment was to "train" people on a new system of music (passive exposure) and see if they could pick up on the regularities without being taught. It turns out that last spring's results were hard to interpret because of the messiness I mentioned. The odd "finding" I referred to here was a secondary analysis I did this summer, trying to see whether the regularities in the exposure system correlated with people's responses - what I initially "found" when I did this analysis a couple weeks ago was that they didn't, and that people's responses only correlated with regularities in "normal" Western music (a big bummer!); but I realized last night that I actually had mixed up two of my samples, and when I fixed it, the correlations came out *better* than they had before.

So, to answer tiurin's question, I haven't really "found" anything worth publishing yet, it's just an interim result that indicates that we're not *totally* on the wrong track and that people are in fact sensitive to the regularities in the system. Now we just need a slightly cleaner system and 100 more adults and maybe we'll be good to go. Score.