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by schuetze 2832 days ago
The replicability of the biomedical sciences is just as bad if not worse than in psychology.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tens...

[2] https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on...

1 comments

Yes, that is covered in my wikipedia link and a comment below.

There is a replication crisis in many fields. Not every field.

There is a replication crisis in every field that is not disciplined by a need to achieve externally-defined goals. Chemistry is in good shape because people apply it in order to e.g. create steel.

The difference between a scientist and an engineer is that the scientist answers the question "if I do X, what will happen?", and the engineer answers the question "what do I do in order to get Y to happen?". But if there are no engineers working off of the results, the scientist is free to say anything.

Sadly, as pointed out elsewhere in the subthread, this is a sufficient but not a necessary condition. Medicine has plenty of well-defined goals, but it doesn't know how to meet them. The cheap wisdom there is: if you want something badly enough, there will always be someone willing to sell it to you, whether or not they actually have it.