What's going to happen is another pandemic. Millions will die, and this is what opportunity cost looks like. We recovered from the last one due to mRNA research from NIH grants (NIAID, one of my clients) and DARPA blue sky funding, almost certain to be cut. These people are literally cutting the funding that saved millions of lives from the last pandemic. Full stop. They don't wanna hear about your facts.
One day on HN I read a thread about how academia is (credibly) inundated with fraudulent research/publication practices, the next day I read a comment about how Western academia is (vaguely) the last vanguard against civilizational collapse. There seems to be a disconnect here.
Academic misconduct is an idee fixe on HN, because (1) there is about two orders of magnitude more research occurring than the median HN commenter would guess, (2) misconduct is generally newsworthy, and (3) even a minuscule portion of fraudulent research is enough to keep a steady drumbeat of misconduct stories to vote and comment on.
And (4) just as everyone likes to think they could have made it as a pro athlete, everyone likes to think they could have made it as an academic, but had better things to do.
- Brian Nosek's team examined 100 studies from high-ranking psychology journals in 2015, and could only reproduce 1/3 of them.
- Tim Errington did the same for cancer papers, and could not reproduce most of them either (he spent 8 years for this efforts btw)
- When you aggregate the reported p-value in scientific publications, it often reveals a "funny" distribution (Leggett 2013, Ookubo 2016)
They are not picking up rare misconducts by low-profile researchers. Fraudant research (from p-hacking to data rigging) is
very common and a very serious issue.
I don't have much to say about psychology. But Tim Errington himself pushes back on the notion you're trying to sell, that his failure to reproduce research in his own replication projects creates a "yes this research is real" and "no this research isn't" result. Reproduction is hard, effect sizes can be small, reproduction studies can themselves be flawed (that's just how science goes).
The biggest thing though is just this idea that a non-reproducing paper is a failure of science. Journal articles are the beginnings of conversation in a discipline, not the last word on it.
You can see what I mean, though: people who probably couldn't name 3 important researchers in a field see people working on replications in those fields (Nosek, Errington) as celebrities. Because reported failures to replicate are newsworthy, and the day-by-day grind of incremental findings and negative results aren't.
I'm sure you can find evidence for both pretty easily. But that doesn't change the facts in this case - we would not have had any Covid-19 vaccines at all without the NIH funding that is presently being cut. And just because we have non-reproducible studies in psychology does not mean there's an issue in biology or chemistry. Your flippant answer doesn't change the facts of the case.
