> 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.
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.
I believe this is just a transcript of the ongoing experiment, see "status: in progress". Looks like gwern didn't write up the data yet, they have a lot of other experiments going on at the same time most likely..
I don’t know why someone submitted it, but we’re reading it because your “in progress” is ambiguous between “writeup/literature summary in progress” and “experiment in progress”. The first is potentially worth reading, the second is likely not.
It is an admittedly biased self-study that while very detailed in explaining the approach and methodology is very flawed from a credibility standpoint though.
I suppose you think that knowledge of the condition might have an effect on quality of sleep or the reporting of that quality. That's reasonable, but hardly a reason not to engage in the experiment. No experiment is perfect.
We should actually have more published unconclusive experiments. Scientists are pushed too hard to generate break-through results, even when there are none. Thats the reason why we're in current reproducibility crisis.
Well reporting it is important even if you learned nothing. It could be that you personally could learn nothing, or it could be that there is nothing to learn. Distributing findings is core to scientific progress even if your findings are underwhelming.
To aid other researchers interested in replication by sharing the methodology and references to other existing research, since other people might find different results.
