This is a very worthwhile article in terms of simple facts. It covers largely the same ground as the Slate Star Codex piece a few years back, updated and made more accessible. But I can't help wondering at the article's urge to challenge all of science or none of it. It feels rather protective, as though the author is unwilling to countenance the possibility that studies in psychology (and related subfields) in particular are in jeopardy.

"The replication crisis as it’s understood today may yet prove to be a passing worry or else a mild problem calling for a soft corrective. It might also grow and spread in years to come, flaring from the social sciences into other disciplines, burning trails of cinder through medicine, neuroscience, and chemistry."

This brackets the possible outcomes, certainly. But it's one hell of an excluded middle, implying that perhaps there will be no serious errors found (already out of the question) and perhaps entire fields will be wiped away. Realistically, we have a much better understanding of the crisis than this already.

Medicine has a disturbing number of process issues, but many (like ignoring NNTH) are unrelated to replication errors. The neuroscience result is serious but specific to fMRI studies, and the chemistry link there is aggressively misleading. It concerns documentation and yield statistics for very real reactions, not the sort of "whole theories are junk" issues social psych is up against. There is effectively zero chance that chemistry and psychology come out of this looking equally good (or bad), and I'm disturbed by the equivocation.

"If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk."

This is hyperbole, fine, but it still aggravates me in light of the other section. These two things are not comparable! One contravenes fundamental physics, the other says most psychology results are unproven (not even false, just unproven). Michael Inzlict says of the crisis "I feel like the ground is moving from underneath me, and I no longer know what is real and what is not," but even he doesn't consider this comparable to the collapse of basic physics.

A quick look at the Engber's other articles suggests a similar thread runs through all of them. He covers specific replication failures, but runs headlines like "Science Is Broken. How Much Should We Fix It? More rigor in research could stamp out false positive results. It might also do more harm than good." He writes about Gary Taubes (recently) as though past errors on carbs make Taubes (consistently failed) claims true. The list goes on.

There is a weird, pervasive implication - not just in Engber's writing - that the replication crisis means we must throw everything up in the air equally. That maybe ego depletion is still true-as-studied, and maybe basic chemistry and biology are false. This clouds needless confusion around the information we have already, and fuels a "teach the controversy" attitude on topics from stereotype threat to insulin. We would be better served by a less hedged but more cautious approach that makes real effort to discuss how confident we should be on what points.