> Either science isn't what we think it is Science isn't what most people think it is. "Reliability" is not the point of science. It never has been. This whol

> Either science isn't what we think it is Science isn't what most people think it is. "Reliability" is not the point of science. It never has been. This whole process started with a bunch of old white guys tooling around in dark medieval cottages trying to turn urine into gold. And yet we've still managed to come pretty far. Science is best understood as a very special form of dialogue. It doesn't matter so much what is being said but it's very important how it is said. It is not a problem at all if one group of scientists are putting out papers claiming X and another group fails to reproduce X. That's the whole point. It's exactly how the dialogue is supposed to go. It would be a problem if one group of scientist published a paper claiming X and then somehow forbid others from trying to reproduce X. Or, when the second group failed to reproduce X the first group sought to discredit or villify or suppress the second group. This would be a big problem and would indicate a termination of the scientific process. The real problem is that this view of science as a neverending, specialized dialogue is not understood by most people, even most scientists, unless they've been exposed to the philosophy of science. That science in itself is so poorly understood leads to silly articles about a "reproduciability crisis" (as if there was ever a time when the majority of scientific papers were shown to be reproducible) but it makes scientific claims easily impersonated ie pseudo-science. It's not clear what the solution really is here but worrying about the "reliability" of certain papers doesn't feel like it would really move the needle.