> Different focal spots corresponded to different smells, which we’ve replicated first-try on two people and validated with a blind trial.

So, N=2 and the people in question are co-authors. I'm not in this business, but isn't this too... early to publish?

Certainly! We didn't get a chance to test it on more people before we had to take it apart, but we thought the result was too cool to share. Would love to see other folks run with the idea!

It’s just a blog post. No academic is going to read it as more than a very promising early result.

The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.

Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.

Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.