you miss my point. the strength of a novel main finding must be sufficient to warrant the opportunity cost of trying to get it published. a weak but real effect

you miss my point. the strength of a novel main finding must be sufficient to warrant the opportunity cost of trying to get it published. a weak but real effect will be more or less strongly indicated in an experiment, just by the vagaries of the sample, but weak results typically will not get published. it is thus not surprising to me that findings might frequently be replicable but weaker than initially was found.