[api]

Something really fascinates me about medicine... it's so incredibly difficult to actually tell if anything works!

I mean look at the debates over antidepressant drugs. There are some large studies that claim most are no better than placebo, and others that claim otherwise.

I feel like there has to be room for improvement here. Maybe we need to start learning to go beyond large studies at a distance and start really measuring things in real time, e.g. with something like an evolved connected descendant of the FitBit.

[Normati]

It's because most scientists and the organizations funding them are not interested in advancing our knowledge of nature so much as looking like they're advancing our knowledge of nature. If we want to be less wrong, we need more replication. Scientists don't want to do replication because it advances our knowledge of nature without looking like it is. So instead they keep trying to find fainter and more obscure effects, so faint that they exceed their own abilities to recognize statistical significance. It fools reviewers, journal editors and employers though, so they keep it up.

[ramblerman]

To argue, scientists/corporations are interested in the illusion of advancement is a fair point, albeit a pessimistic one.

"Scientists don't want to do replication because it advances our knowledge of nature without looking like it is"

To argue they therefore purposely want to prevent actual progress (on a whole) seems disingenuous.