Against theory-motivated experimentation in science

Scientists must choose which among many experiments to perform. We study the epistemic success of experimental choice strategies proposed by philosophers of science or executed by scientists themselves. We develop a multi-agent model of the scientific process that jointly formalizes its core aspects: active experimentation, theorizing, and social learning. We find that agents who choose new experiments at random develop the most accurate theories of the world. The agents aiming to confirm, falsify theories, or resolve theoretical disagreements end up with an illusion of epistemic success: they develop promising accounts for the data they collected, while completely misrepresenting the ground truth that they intended to learn about. Agents experimenting in theory-motivated ways acquire less diverse or less representative samples from the ground truth that also turn out to be easier to account for. Random data collection, on the other hand, combines virtues of diverse and representative sampling from a target scientific domain which enables cumulative development of the successful theoretical accounts of it. We suggest that randomization, already a gold standard within experiments, is also beneficial at the level of experiments themselves.