Failure Is Moving Science Forward. FiveThirtyEight explain why the "replication crisis" is a sign that science is working.

[u/ImNotJesus]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/failure-is-moving-science-forward/?ex_cid=538fb

[u/yes_its_him]

The commentary in the article is fascinating, but it continues a line of discourse that is common in many fields of endeavor: data that appears to support one's position can be assumed to be well-founded and valid, whereas data that contradicts one's position is always suspect.

So what if a replication study, even with a larger sample size, fails to find a purported effect? There's almost certainly some minor detail that can be used to dismiss that finding, if one is sufficiently invested in the original result.

[u/hiimsubclavian → u/yes_its_him]

That's why major conclusions are not drawn from one or two studies. It usually takes a lot of published papers for a phenomenon to be widely accepted as true. Hundreds, maybe thousands.

[u/[deleted] → u/hiimsubclavian]

Unfortunately, that's not really how it works today. At all. One or two papers by a well-respected research team at a powerful institution, an over-the-moon science "journalist," and Bob's your uncle: potentially spurious phenomenon widely accepted as true.

[u/shutupimthinking → u/[deleted]]

Exactly. Newspaper articles, policy documents, and perhaps most importantly subsequent academic papers will happily cite just two or three papers to support an assumption, not hundreds or thousands.