Since this website is called Less Wrong, I think there should be a good overview of Karl Popper's falsifiability concept somewhere. It's a surprisingly subtle concept in practice -- the short version is that yes, falsifiability is necessary for a hypothesis to be meaningful, but the hard part is actually...
This can be read as a response to Einstein's Arrogance. There, Eliezer Yudkowsky has argued that usually, when you have enough evidence to even conceive of a theory, you have enough evidence to be pretty sure it's correct. Here, I argue that this state of affairs held only in theoretical...
Maciej Cegłowski has written an article named Scott and Scurvy, which has already been discussed on LW as an example of the "messiness" of science in practice. Cegłowski follows the story of how a working cure for scurvy was found and then lost to an incorrect theory in the face...