Science vs Software
Andrew Gelman has a brief post up on his blog comparing the way bug reports in open source software are received to the way many researchers respond to criticisms of their work. The comments there are good, and cover my first reaction, which was, "Developers respond well to bug reports?" But that's a bit tongue in cheek. I do think that, overall, developers are a bit more responsive to bug reports than scientists are to published criticisms of their work. Here are my theories as to why that is: