Comment by trhway
2 days ago
Something is very wrong and corrupt if a large field of science, an army of scientists spending billions of dollars, is ruled by one easily repeatable study/experiment, and yet nobody cares to repeat it.
2 days ago
Something is very wrong and corrupt if a large field of science, an army of scientists spending billions of dollars, is ruled by one easily repeatable study/experiment, and yet nobody cares to repeat it.
Scientists do repeat experiments, they just don't publish the results because no one cares.
Specifically, results are replicated wherever you want to build on something someone has done. For example I'm making specific glass off of a Nature paper for a totally unrelated use.
If the glass doesn't work out will I publish my results? No, too much work to get rejected.
>Specifically, results are replicated wherever you want to build on something someone has done.
yes, you want to test your Alzheimer treatment, and you measure the amyloid in the patients before the treatment, and you don't find it in some patients... Are you not going to publish that?
To be clear, science is a shit show. Especially biology.
That being said, it's not true that we don't replicate results. We don't intend to, and we don't do it for the sake of replication, but as a matter of conducting experiments we do a lot of replicating.
And negative results are just thrown out.
Nobody ever got tenure for repeating an existing experiment and getting the same results. It is a problem of incentives. Aside from doing something expensive like grant terms including potentially 'drafting' some scientists to attempt to replicate reproducible studies for funding as their next project I'm not sure what could be done to fix it.
Experiments are repeated if someone else is looking to expand on the work actually... it's just that if it doesn't work, no one wants to go to the effort of publishing that since it's a lot of effort and there'll be politics with the original author and there's the possibility that it was just a "push it through to satisfy the metrics" paper that every researcher "allows" every other researcher purely out of sympathy and there's the review process and deadlines and rebuttals and more deadlines and...
I suppose if you only value this entire end to end process then the experiment is not being repeated at all, but yeah, most things just get discarded when they don't work.