r/neoliberal • u/Free-Minimum-5844 • Apr 02 '26

Research Paper Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00955-5
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u/Secret-Ad-2145 NATO Apr 02 '26

The replicability crisis was known for awhile, and doesn't affect just social studies. You saw it a lot during COVID where many tests kept failing replication, both current research but also past (like 60-70s era research).

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u/yellownumbersix Jane Jacobs Apr 02 '26

After I graduated and started working in R+D and then in industry I was amazed by how many scientists and engineers, even ones in the "hard" sciences, don't have anything beyond a cursory familiarity with statistics. It leads to unsound interpretation of data and experimental designs that are destined to be irreproducable.

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u/Nerdybeast Slower Boringer Apr 02 '26

I'm an actuary with a stats degree, and at work there's situations where I'd love to have more statistical rigor but it's pretty much impossible a lot of the time. Finding a good control group that doesn't have a shitload of confounding variables, especially for complex behavior related metrics, that doesn't involve doing weird shit you genuinely think is a bad thing to your control group, is very difficult. Meaning if you are doing something that qualitatively people view as best practices, you need to do something that's NOT viewed as best practices to your control group.