Comment by Zhong_Lu on Outside the Laboratory · 2007-01-23T08:30:20.000Z · LW · GW

So what if a scientist has the "wrong" mentality towards lotteries? So what if he believes in the "spirit world?"

Why should anyone care what a scientist believes in as long as he comes up with results? When scientists peer-review another, they ask questions like: "did you follow the correct procedure?" or "Did you interpret the data correctly?" They do not ask silly questions like "Do you know what the experimental method is?" and rightly so. Publishing scientists are pragmatic people who care about results more than anything else. It shouldn't matter what a scientists believe in; as long as he gets results and he publishes, then he's a "good scientist." This is the only criteria we should judge scientists by.