About proving vs refuting. Here's the perfect example. The famous Bellevue all-meat trial. A couple guys ate only meat for a year. Conclusion is no adverse effect. Did it prove meat is good for you? No. But it certainly refuted all claims about its detrimental effects of the time, i.e. that it would cause scurvy.
Personally I often cited that experiment to refute claims like meat causes cancer, heart disease, whatnots. If it did, we'd have seen it in that experiment, but we didn't, therefore it does not. But refutation doesn't seem to be in my opponents' vocabulary or comprehension. Instead, it's all about proving for them. Ironically, it's almost always done with observational evidence, which can never do that anyways. There's some exceptions like Collin Campbell's mice experiment with casein and cancer, where he concludes that even though he used aflatoxin to cause cancer in the first place, even though he used mice and not humans, even though he used casein, he still concludes - he "proves" - meat causes cancer in humans. In fact, his experiment refuted claims about meat, and instead demonstrated (the likelihood of) an alternative culprit - aflatoxin, casein, mice. He basically shot his hypothesis in the foot, though like I said refutation isn't in his vocabulary or comprehension. That's another word, demonstration, which is often mistaken for the word prove.
Another example is more obscure, the double-slit experiment. It is understood as proving that particles exist - or behave - as both particles and waves simultaneously. Every scientist on the planet acts as if that experiment proved it. The entire field of physics is based on that assumption of proof. If anything, the experiment refuted the individual claims that a particle was a wave or a particle. We still don't know what a particle is, that's the point.
But there's a problem with refutation. You gotta start with an actual hypothesis and an accurate experiment, not a fallacy, i.e moving the goalposts, false dichotomy, etc. We've seen this with low-carb experiments where the low-carb diet wasn't actually low-carb - moving the goalposts. Or where there was multiple diets but none was low-carb - false dichotomy. But when they do it well, we get things like the A-TO-Z experiment that refutes nicely all the horrible claims about low-carb.
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