It's OK to be wrong

This morning one of my Facebook friends shared a link to this blog post on Psychology Today, wherein a researcher goes on a rather embittered rant about the publication of a journal article that failed to replicate one of his lab's earlier findings. Now, he likely has some very valid points about differences in experimental procedures that influenced the results or explanations the researchers failed to consider. The problem is that he attacks the researchers and the journal in a completely unprofessional way that just makes him appear to be bitter that someone said he was wrong.

As someone who has been on both sides of the 'failure to replicate' debate, my advice to a researcher who feels that a replication attempt was not valid would be to 1) publish a (professional!) comment/reply in that journal or 2) Perform your own follow-up studies to provide further evidence for your position and publish a paper on it. Here the bitter guy claims that he had no choice but to scrutinize the article on his blog because he had never been asked to review the original article. The article in question, however, was published in PLoS ONE, which encourages post-publication review in the form of online comments and discussion. There are currently no comments on the paper on the PLoS ONE website. Instead of starting a professional, scholarly debate in an appropriate forum he just kind of made himself look like an asshole.

Professionalism issues and this specific incident aside, I think the more important point to be made here is that it's OK to be wrong.  Science isn't a static process where you prove something to be true and then it's true for all eternity. Science is about having a falsifiable hypothesis and testing it... which means the possibility of being wrong is built right into the scientific method!

Even the best and brightest, award-winning scientists have been wrong. Sometimes you're not totally wrong, you're just not entirely right. Sometimes you are shown to be wrong with the advent of new technology that allows us to look at things in a way that wasn't previously possible. Science isn't about being "right" or finding the "truth", it's about coming to a conclusion based on the best available current evidence. As that evidence changes over time with new technology and new ideas then our conclusions need to change too. Someone showing that your theory is wrong does not make you a bad or worthless scientist, it probably just means that you are doing something important enough for people to follow-up on! So let's stop thinking about who's right and who's wrong - we're all wrong, just in varying degrees of wrongness that may take more or less time to uncover. As long as the field as a whole is advancing and you are doing your part to contribute new knowledge, then you're doing science right.

UPDATE: Here is an example of how to proceed when someone writes an article disagreeing with your research and you want to follow up with some points on why you disagree:  http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(12)00053-8