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2020-11-12 c
"Scientists know how to produce solid, reproducible science. It’s just that the scientific community’s incentives give them an overwhelming motivation not to bother."

The Crisis Wrecking Modern Science

Biases toward exciting new results (and against negative ones) lead to widespread malpractice

... Ritchie had just discovered how the replication crisis works.

The replication crisis, for those who have not heard of it, refers to the sad fact that a terrifyingly large amount of published scientific research is junk. Psychology studies of “social priming,” marine biology studies of ocean acidification, biomedical studies of cancer drugs; the research can’t be reproduced and therefore has no claim to scientific validity. We don’t know just how much research is junk because scientists haven’t yet tested to see which results hold up. But the junk research is a mountain, there are larger mountains of research built unsuspectingly on the junk, and the result is that each year we waste tens of billions of research dollars.

Ritchie argues that modern science’s flawed incentives produced the replication crisis. Scientists earn tenure, grants, and reputation from publishing research, above all from publishing exciting, new, positive results. Journal editors also prefer to publish exciting new research, so scientists just don’t submit negative results for publication. (read more)

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