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by privong·7y ago·view on hn ↗
> No conclusion? What's the point of doing research or reporting it if you learned nothing?

This attitude is (imho) a major problem in research/academia. If you've done research into something you should report it even if the results were unclear, ambiguous, or non-existent. For one it lets people know if this is a fruitful avenue to pursue and/or whether further study is warranted. It can thus reduce unnecessary repetition of effort. Furthermore, making the findings and methodology public enables people to use it as a starting point for other studies, perhaps varying the methodology or asking different questions on related topics.

Though I think @cypherpunks01 and @WalterSear are likely right about this particular article/page.

1 comments
Yes, if your experiment was well designed you will learn something from it and your experiment's design will indeed speak for itself because its conclusion diminishes the search space of what can be known -- on one side of your hypothesis or the other.

But to report no conclusion means your experiment has failed: either your method was bad (and your work deserves oblivion), or you reported only your data, or you didn't even report that. It's not clear in this case which of the last two scenarios apply here, but reporting only data without a discussion of results or conclusion adds precious little.

Ill-conceived, badly executed, or incomplete experiments add nothing to our knowledge of the world, except more noise. There are already too many unreplicatable experimental conclusions in science today. Let's not short-circuit the experimental method (to wit: missing negative/positive controls, incomplete discussion of results in the context of the DOE, and a judicious conclusion of the in/significance of those contextualized validated results).

The scientific method has a tough enough row to hoe these days. Let's not make it harder by inviting weeds through methodological neglect.