That is not my understanding of what “not replicable” means. My understanding is “attempted to replicate, but didn’t get any significant results supporting the original conclusion”. There’s nothing that says that the new results are inconsistent with the original findings, only that they couldn’t find any support for them in a similar study.
And that could be for a number of reasons. Of course, sometimes the results are just wrong, due to statistical flukes, or too creative data cleaning and analysis. Often the results might just be much more limited than what the original study claims: Maybe the results of a psychological study is valid for MIT students in the beginning of the semester, before lunch, but not for Yale students in the early afternoon. In this case the only mistake would have been to assume the results were universal.
It is amazing how many smart people have bad intuition on science, misunderstand the null hypothesis, etc. So much for the viability of a scientific thinking populace afaict: it seems not possible to pull off.
And that could be for a number of reasons. Of course, sometimes the results are just wrong, due to statistical flukes, or too creative data cleaning and analysis. Often the results might just be much more limited than what the original study claims: Maybe the results of a psychological study is valid for MIT students in the beginning of the semester, before lunch, but not for Yale students in the early afternoon. In this case the only mistake would have been to assume the results were universal.