Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by weland 3878 days ago
> Returning to the point, it takes incredible mental gymnastics to argue that a false positive automatically degrades the status of a study from "scientific" to "unscientific"

No one said anything about A false positive!

"Cannot be reproduced" means there were a lot of false positives. So many, in fact, that you can't really draw any conclusion from the experiment. (Edit:) Or more to the point, that the p value the original authors claimed was bullshit.

Reproducing an experiment means reproducing both the experimental technique and the sample.