Many commenters seem to be relating this post to the Reproducibility Project, which showed problems with reproducing around 100 psychology studies. It's importa

Many commenters seem to be relating this post to the Reproducibility Project, which showed problems with reproducing around 100 psychology studies. It's important to understand the real conclusions of that project, which is not at all that 'only a small number of studies are accurate'. Strictly on the basis of significance — a statistical measure of how likely it is that a result did not occur by chance — 35 of the studies held up, and 62 did not. (Three were excluded because their significance was not clear.) The overall “effect size,” a measure of the strength of a finding, dropped by about half across all of the studies. Yet very few of the redone studies contradicted the original ones; their results were simply weaker.[0] Also, as one person pointed out in the same article: Dr. Schwarz, who was not involved in any of the 100 studies that were re-examined, said that the replication studies themselves were virtually never evaluated for errors in design or analysis.[0] And finally, that's how science is supposed to work. Research isn't a hard conclusion but an argument in a long debate:[1] But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works. Science is not a body of facts that emerge, like an orderly string of light bulbs, to illuminate a linear path to universal truth. Rather, science (to paraphrase Henry Gee, an editor at Nature) is a method to quantify doubt about a hypothesis, and to find the contexts in which a phenomenon is likely. Failure to replicate is not a bug; it is a feature. It is what leads us along the path — the wonderfully twisty path — of scientific discovery. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-scien... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not-in-crisis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not...