I love science, but I have a lot of issues with it lately. I'm going to express some of them since they're related to this topic. The basic function of a scien

I love science, but I have a lot of issues with it lately. I'm going to express some of them since they're related to this topic. The basic function of a scientific paper is understanding and reproducibility (inspired by jfaucett his comment). I wonder, is reproducibility necessary? Is it even possible when things get really complex? Isn't consensus enough? I feel in the field of psychology (and most social sciences) that is what happens. I suppose consensus can be easily gamed by publication bias and a whole slew of other things. So I suppose as jfaucett puts it, a "discover for yourself" type of thing should still be there. I wonder how qualitative research could be saved and if you could call it science. In Dutch it is all called "wetenschap" and "weten" means to know. But how should we go about design then? HCI papers use a a lot of design of design that is never justified. The paper is like: we build a system, it improved our user metrics. But is there any intuition or theory written down as to why they designed something a certain way? Not really. I suppose one strong way to get reproducibility is by getting all the inputs needed. In a psychology study this means getting a dataset. Correlations are fuzzy but if I get the same answers out of the same dataset, then the claims must be true for that particular dataset. Regarding design and qualitative studies, maybe, film everything? The general themes that everybody would agree upon watching everything would be the reproducible part of it? Ok, I'll stop. The whole idea of that a paper needs to satisfy the criterion of reproducibility confuses me when I look at what science is nowadays.