[mike_hearn]

Science isn't self correcting. These problems have existed for many decades. There were people complaining that social science doesn't replicate back in the 1960s.

The idea that science is self-correcting is a nice fiction spread by academics to absolve themselves of the need to reform. "Don't make us change, any problems will go away if you wait because science is naturally self correcting", they say. It's a silly word game. Academia, which is what they mean when they say science, is a human institution whose incentives lead naturally to rewarding bad behavior. Nothing in that system self corrects, corrections must be forced from the outside (or we give up on reform and dissolve the whole thing, a solution now actively being talked about in hardline right-wing forums).

[IronyMan100]

There ideas in how to get better. -People start talking about pre-register studies, where the study design is evaluated independent of the results. -Some years ago Nature was thightening the acceptance criteria for articles about new laser principles. - in the field of metasurfaces there are more and more articles in how to assess the performance of flat optics and calling Out Problems with the Status quo. Honestly, i Don't See your point. Is the progress maybe slow... Yes. But changes are Happening. It's also in the best interest of Academia. You don't want to build Up your career (~5-30 years)on someone else fraudulent.

[mike_hearn]

These ideas are all decent in the abstract but all rely on the assumption that there are auditors of some kind. There aren't.

Example: pre-registration does happen sometimes today, and it always happens for corporate clinical trials. It's a good idea that works. In the private case the FDA is the auditor and there's some circumstantial evidence that pre-registration may be the reason why pharma productivity flatlined around ~2000. But in a surprising number of cases in academia a study is pre-registered, the final paper doesn't match the pre-registration and nobody notices. Why? Well, who is responsible for systematically checking these things? It'd have to be auditors, but universities point the finger at journals and journals point the finger back at universities.

Papers calling out problems: it's been done for much longer than I've been alive. Doesn't work. People nod their head and say something should be done, then go right back to the bad old ways.

The only thing that can help is external force. Governments have to either defund academia and let science be done by the private sector, or they have to tie funding to passing rigorous external audits (by private sector actors paid to find fraud, not academics themselves). The latter has been tried a few times, the US ORI is an example of that, but it doesn't work. The ORI was set up on the assumption that academic malpractice is rare so its methods don't scale.