Comment by raddan

I’d like to see some evidence of this. Not to mention—experiments that show a phenomenon is more complicated than originally thought is not evidence of shoddy work. It’s just science. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

A good example is Kahneman and Tversky’s work on the conjunction fallacy. We now know that “stereotype threat” is not the only reason somebody might make a mistake of the kind they were studying. And over the decades, better experiments introduced better controls and more nuanced analysis. That said, people still make conjunction fallacies, but the effects are not as pronounced as originally believed. Is this bad science? Absolutely not! The finding is, in fact, pretty robust; we just know that there’s more at work.

So how do you count that? Is that a “failure to replicate”? Technically speaking, yes. But it is not bad science, and more importantly, it’s not a standard that we hold even “hard” scientists to. Nobody is saying that Newton has been discredited because of general relativity.