[pacbard]

> drawing sweeping conclusions from a single specific experiment

It seems that you are bringing up the main issue with modern scientific production. Research studies that do not have sweeping/popular/weird conclusions do not get press and the ones that do get coverage. That creates a perverse incentive for researchers to either do research in "popular" topics and to have new insights/conclusions even when these are not really supported by the results.

It is not an accident that you are reading about this specific study in vice rather than the 100s of other incrementalist studies about depression that got published over the past year.

[detaro]

Without having dug out the study, I'm not sure that applies here. "Here's an experiment that suggests X could be a thing", later studies find "yes, might be a thing, but doesn't translate very well to other setups and cases" is completely fine process. What's not is someone coming 40 years later and throwing a breathless generalized headline on it, despite actually mentioning the negative results later.