[karaterobot]

The problem is that we don't know what the baseline really is. We know that between a third and a half of results from peer reviewed papers in many domains cannot be replicated. Looking closer, we see what look like irregularities in some of them, but it's harder to say which of them are fraud, which are honest mistakes, and which of them just can't be replicated due to some other factors. But because so many of these studies just don't pay off for one reason or another, I would agree that it is getting really hard to rely on a process which is, if nothing else, supposed to result in reliable and trustworthy information.

[cycomanic]

Where is that number of 1/3-1/2 coming from? And which fields? I find that very hard to believe (at least if we exclude the obvious fraudulent journals, where no actual research gets published)

[zeroCalories]

I think he's referencing the replication crisis that was a big deal a few years ago. Psychology was hit hard(unsurprising), but a few other fields in the biology area were also hit.

[karaterobot]

It's worst in Psychology and the Social Sciences, but it's not limited to them. Per Wikipedia:

> A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others), and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. But fewer than 20% had been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. The survey found that fewer than 31% of researchers believe that failure to reproduce results means that the original result is probably wrong, although 52% agree that a significant replication crisis exists. Most researchers said they still trust the published literature

Not sure if the results of that online study have (or can) themselves be reproduced, however. It's turtles all the way down.

[zeroCalories]

Skimmed the wiki on the replication crisis, and people have actually tried to systemically replicate popular studies and found similar results. You could say there has been a successful replication of failure to replicate.