Certainly, the reproducibility crisis in social science and cancer biology is important, and deserves attention. But this article mostly strikes me as profoun

Certainly, the reproducibility crisis in social science and cancer biology is important, and deserves attention. But this article mostly strikes me as profoundly overstated. Yes, science is done by humans, and is thus imperfect. Yes, science's approach to truth is nonmonotonic. (I think most working scientists would consider this obvious.) Yes, scientists have various incentives to hype surprising results, cut corners, and even cheat. Yes, a lot of bad science gets published. But clearly science is making progress, since we clearly know more than we did 5, 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Are there things that could be done to improve the way science is conducted? Almost certainly (e.g. preregistering experimental trials, requiring power analysis in published papers), but this article is remarkable quiet about such things. In the end, what is author even really saying? That lay people should trust scientists less than they do? That doesn't seem correct to me. For instance, on climate change, it seems that normal people trust scientists a good deal less than they should, instead placing their trust in talking heads, politicians, and people who are unambiguously paid by oil companies to advocate on their behalf. So: yes, science as practiced in 2016 is imperfect. But what exactly do you propose replacing it with?