No doubt it is a target-rich environment. However, his arguments are so generic that they could apply to any field studying anything multifactorial or with high

No doubt it is a target-rich environment. However, his arguments are so generic that they could apply to any field studying anything multifactorial or with high variance. Fundamentally, however, I don't believe, for example, that physicists are more scrupulous/intelligent/honest than biologists, who are more so than psychologists. The irreproducibility rates in a field have to be primarily caused by the nature of the system studied in that field rather than some inherent attributes of the researchers. So any field will have some constant level of irreproducibility which which essentially cannot be changed. But some researchers do better than others. My fundamental point is that if you want to change what can be changed, and genuinely improve a field, you have to focus the criticisms on specific bad actors rather than target an entire field at once and leverage a near-tautology (more complex systems yield more irreproducible results) into a 20-year tirade/career. Also, helpfully for people like Ioannidis, a statement like "field X has lots of errors and irreproducibility" is non-falsifiable, and indeed will be true no matter what, so he is taking no risk with his criticisms -- even though they do more damage to public perception, morale, and funding, and help less to change things than targeted criticisms would do. If I sound irritated by this sort of thing, it is because my graduate advisor dabbled in "meta-science" / "error correction" and I stoutly refused to have anything to do with those projects. I thought, and still think, that it is considerably more valuable to try to build my own solid lego tower despite the difficulties rather than knocking down other people's, despite the latter being considerably easier and a fairly simple and reliable route to a high citation count. In the end, irreproducible or erroneous papers in science just get ignored rather than retracted, and I think that's fine.