> It's a byproduct of software not being grounded in anything compared to, say, every other engineering discipline. They all have the laws of physics.
I think experimental evidence helps, but if you look at the physical sciences more closely, you'll find tons of similar narratives. This is a fairly universal human behavior unfortunately. Nonsense becomes "canonized" as I put it, and then continues to be repeated by people until someone finally looks into it and realizes it's nonsense and publishes an article saying so. But unfortunately that's not always the end of the nonsense. Even things which have been debunked can continue to be cited and used. One great example (not engineering but the point stands):
> In one sense we won. We got our points across. People now understand that this research is wrong. But this 2005 article by Fredrickson and Losada gets citations today at 3 times the rate of our article that demonstrated that it was just utter rubbish.
(Note that I'm using "nonsense" as an example here, but the top level comment was more general in that it mentions practices which apply in some situations erroneously being applied for all situations.)
I think experimental evidence helps, but if you look at the physical sciences more closely, you'll find tons of similar narratives. This is a fairly universal human behavior unfortunately. Nonsense becomes "canonized" as I put it, and then continues to be repeated by people until someone finally looks into it and realizes it's nonsense and publishes an article saying so. But unfortunately that's not always the end of the nonsense. Even things which have been debunked can continue to be cited and used. One great example (not engineering but the point stands):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoe3xXFtmM
> In one sense we won. We got our points across. People now understand that this research is wrong. But this 2005 article by Fredrickson and Losada gets citations today at 3 times the rate of our article that demonstrated that it was just utter rubbish.
(Note that I'm using "nonsense" as an example here, but the top level comment was more general in that it mentions practices which apply in some situations erroneously being applied for all situations.)