this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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This is the essence of science. Being wrong is exciting because it means that you're on to something. The way scientific theories are made is by challenging what you believe -- trying to prove your idea wrong. If you repeatedly can't prove it wrong then you're probably approaching something that is true which continually adds to the certainty that you're onto something. That's what the sigma certainty means in scientific discoveries. It refers to the possible margin of error in a discovery.
The sigma certainty is essentially, 1 sigma is about 85% certain - or a 1 in 7 chance you're wrong, 2 sigma is about 97.75% certainty - or a 1 in 45 chance you're wrong, 3 sigma is about 99.98% certain - or about 1 in 5000 chance of being wrong, etc. It depends on which scientific field you're in as to which level of sigma is considered enough for something to officially become an accepted theory, in Astronomy a 6 sigma is where the line is drawn which is about 1 in 500 million chance of being wrong (~99.9999998% certain).
In real science, a null result is a disaster because you probably can't get the results published. And, even if you could, you might not want to publish because spending a lot of time and not being able to prove what you set out to prove looks bad.
But, on Mythbusters, they were the very best episodes. The team had a lot of common sense, so most of the time they could predict the outcomes. They still verified their assumptions, but it wasn't that exciting. But, when the result went against expectations, they got so excited, and they worked really hard to verify they were wrong.
I think people can be too proud of being wrong, to the point they don't value being right.