Avoiding mistakes is certainly highly desirable.  However it is also  widely acknowledged that perfectionism is inimicable to creativity.  And in ordinary life, perfectionism carried beyond a certain point is  indicative of a psychological disorder.  In the extreme case, a   perfectionist becomes so paralyzed by all the possible mistakes he might  make that he is unable to even leave the house.    In science, we want to discover as much truth about the world as possible  and we also want to have as much certainty as possible about these  discoveries.  Usually there is some trade-off between these two desiderata  --- the search for scope and the search for certainty.    If 18th century mathematicians had demanded total rigor from Newton and  Leibniz then there would probably be no calculus today, because neither  of the two could explain calculus in a way that really made sense, since  they lacked the concept of a limit.  And in fact, because of the lack of  a rigorous foundation, they made a number of errors in their use of calculus.  It was only a hundred years later that Weistrass was able to give a solid  grounding for the ideas of Newton and Leibniz.  Nonetheless, what Newton  and Leibniz did was undoubtedly science and mathematics gained a great  deal more from the application of their important ideas than it lost  through the mistakes they made.    In article <1993Apr14.171230.16138@kestrel.edu> king@reasoning.com      (Dick King) writes: >  [ Somebody writes: ] >>I doubt if Einstein used any formal methodology.  .... >  .... >He also proposed numerous experiments which if performed would distinguish a >universe in which special relativity holds from one in which it does not. >         .... >Einstein played by the rules, which demand that hypotheses only be put out >there if there exists a specific experiment that could disprove them.  These are not the rules according to many who post to sci.med and sci.psychology.  According to these posters  "If it's not supported by carefully designed controlled studies then it's not science."  Taken to the extreme, I believe that the attitude that empirical studies  are everything and ideas are nothing results in a complete stultification  of science.    For one thing, an insistence on an elaborate and expensive methodology  results in a sort of scientific trade-unionism, where those outside  the establishment and lacking institutional or corporate support have  no chance to obtain a hearing.  (I don't in the least believe that this  is the intention of the arbiters of scientific methodology.  Nonetheless,  it is one of the results.)   And although institutional science has  certainly produced many wonderful results, I think it is a foolish  arrogance for scientists to believe that no one outside the establishment  --- and using less than perfect empirical methodology --- will ever come  with anything worthwhile.    Furthermore, the big bucks approach to science promotes what I think is one of the most significant errors in science:  choosing to investigate questions because they can be readily handled by the currently fashionable methodology (or because one can readily get institutional or corporate sponsorship for them) instead of directing attention to those questions which seem to have fundamental significance.  For instance, certain questions cannot be easily investigated with statistical methods because the relevant factors are not quantitative. (One could argue that this is the case for almost all questions in many areas of psychology.  In my opinion, a perusal of many of the papers resulting from the attempt by psychologists to force these questions into a statistical framework gives the lie to Russell Turpin's assertion that current scientific methods "avoid all known errors.")  I think that asking the wrong question is probably the most fundamental  error in science.  (Ignoring potentially valuable ideas is one of the  others.)  And I think that scientific journals are full of all  too many studies done with impeccable empirical methods but which are  worthless because the wrong question was asked in the first place.    -- In the arguments between behaviorists and cognitivists, psychology seems  less like a science than a collection of competing religious sects.