by mrguyorama | 2025-04-25 19:11:46+00:00
Yet again more people in this site equating "failed to reproduce" with "the original study can't possibly be correct and is probably fraudulent"

That's not how it works. Science is hard, experiment design is hard, and a failure to reproduce could mean a bunch of different things. It could mean the original research failed to mention something critical, or you had a fluke, or you didn't understand the process right, or something about YOUR setup is unknowingly different. Or the process itself is somewhat stochastic.

This goes 10X for such difficult sciences as psychology (which is literally still in infancy) and biology. In these fields, designing a proper experiment (controlling as much as you can) is basically impossible, so we have to tease signal out of noise and it's failure prone.

Hell, go watch Youtube Chemists who have Phds fail to reproduce old papers. Were those papers fraudulent? No, science is just difficult and failure prone.

If you treat "Paper published in Nature/Science" as a source of truth, you will regularly be wrong. Scientists do not do that. Nature is a magazine, and is a business, and sees themselves as trying to push the cutting edge of research, and they will happily publish an outright fraudulent paper if there is even the slightest chance it might be valid, and especially if it would be really cool if it's right.

When discussing how Jan Hendrik Schön got tens of outright fraudulent papers into Nature despite nobody being able to even confirm he ran any experiments, they said that "even false papers can push the field forward". One of the scientists who investigated and helped Schon get fired even said that peer review is no indicator of quality or correctness. Peer review wasn't even a formal part of science publishing until the 60s.

Science is "self correcting" because if the "effect" you saw isn't real, nobody will be able to build off your work. Alzheimer's Amyloid research has been really unproductive, which is how we knew it probably wasn't the magic bullet even before it had fraud scandals.

If you doubt this, look to China. They have ENORMOUS amounts of explicit fraud in their system, as well as a MUCH WORSE "publish or perish" state. Would you suggest it has slowed them down?

Stop trying to outsource your critical thinking to an authority. You cannot do science without publishing wrong or false papers. If you are reading about "science" in a news article, press release, or advertisement, you don't know science. I am continually flabbergasted by how often "Computer Scientists" don't even know the basics of the scientific method.

Scientists understood there was a strong link between cigarettes and cancer at least 20 years before we had comprehensive scientific studies to "prove" it.

That said, there are good things to do to mitigate the harms that "publish or perish" causes, like preregistration and an incentive to publish failed experiments, even though science progressed pretty well for 400 years without them. These reproducibility projects are great, but do not mistake their "these papers failed" as "these papers were written fraudulently, or by bad scientists, or were a waste".

Good programmers WILL ship bugs sometimes. Good scientists WILL publish papers that don't pan out. These are truths of human processes and imperfect systems.