Comment by mike_hearn

> look at any HN thread on the topic of fraud in science.

HN is very tedious/lazy when it comes to science criticism -- very much agree with you on this.

My only point is replication is necessary to establish validity, even if it is not sufficient. Whether it gives a scientist a false sense of security doesn't change the math of sampling.

I also agree with you on quality issues. I think alternative investment strategies (other than project grants) would be a useful step for reducing perverse incentives, for example. But there's a lot of things science could do.

while i agree that "reproducibility is overrated", i went ahead and read your medium post. my feedback to you is, my summary of that writing: "mike_hearn's take on policy-adjacent writing conducted by public health officials and published in journals that interacted with mike_hearn's valid and common but nonetheless subjective political dispute about COVID-19."

i don't know how any of that writing generalizes to other parts of academic research. i mean, i know that you say it does, but i don't think it does. what exactly do you think most academic research institutions and the federal government spend money on? for example, wet lab research. you don't know anything about wet lab research. i think if you took a look at a typical e.g. basic science in immunology paper, built on top of mouse models, you would literally lose track of any of its meaning after the first paragraph, you would feed it into chatgpt, and you would struggle to understand the topic well enough to read another immunology paper, you would have an immense challenge talking about it with a researcher in the field. it would take weeks of reading. you have no medicine background, so you wouldn't understand the long horizon context of any of it. you wouldn't be able to "chatbot" your way into it, it would be a real education. so after all of that, would you still be able to write the conclusion you wrote in the medium post? i don't think so, because you would see that by many measures, you cannot generalize a froo-froo policy between "subjective political dispute about COVID-19" writing and wet lab research. you'd gain the wisdom to see that they're different things, and you lack the background, and you'd be much more narrow in what you'd say.

it doesn't even have to be in the particulars, it's just about wisdom. that is my feedback. you are at once saying that there is greater wisdom to be had in the organization and conduct of research, and then, you go and make the highly low wisdom move to generalize about all academic research. which you are obviously doing not because it makes sense to, you're a smart guy. but because you have some unknown beef with "academics" that stems from anger about valid, common but nonetheless subjective political disputes about COVID-19.

Part of replication is skeptical review. That's also part of the scientific method. If we're not doing thorough review and replication, we're not really doing science. It's a lot of faith in people incentivized to do sloppy or dishonest work.

Edit: I just read your article linked upthread. It was really good. I don't think we disagree except I say we need to attempt the steps of science wherever sensible and there's human/political problems trying to corrupt them. I try to seperately address those by changing hearts with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (Cuz self-interest won't fix science.)

So, we need the replications. We also need to address whatever issues would pop up with them.