First and foremost this is just another social sciences study. Most of everybody is aware of the reproducibility crisis yet seem to fail to connect the dots to

First and foremost this is just another social sciences study. Most of everybody is aware of the reproducibility crisis yet seem to fail to connect the dots to new studies - it's not going anywhere which means that science, particularly in the social and physiological sciences, is somehow deeply flawed. That said, this study confirms my own biases so I want to believe. One big reason is to consider the academic output of schools in places such as Korea and China. Learning is extremely structured and more analogous to a factory line than a school, in the US style, and their output absolutely dwarfs ours. The typical argument against this system is that mechanical teaching leads to mechanical thought, which is is supposed to support things such as the fact that China has an abysmal rate of Nobel laureates. However, something missing there is that Nobel Prizes are frequently rewarded long after something is first done when its relevance is proven or otherwise becomes more clear. For instance Stephen Hawking never received a Nobel prize, yet if we observed Hawking Radiation - he likely would have been awarded one for a theoretic hypothesis dating back to 1974. The point there is that as recently as the 1950s Chinese were starving to death by tens of millions and they had little to no academic culture to speak of. Their riveting success is a very much a new thing and so the lack of Nobel standard achievements is something that's not [yet] a reasonable indication of much.