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I think that would depend on how much intersection there is between the sort of scientists doing non-replicable research (mostly in academia, it seems) and the
by thu2111 5y ago
I think that would depend on how much intersection there is between the sort of scientists doing non-replicable research (mostly in academia, it seems) and the sorts of scientists developing working cancer therapies (mostly in pharma?).
I don't know if arguments about "real" science are especially useful. The nature of science has changed a lot of over time and will presumably keep changing. It takes us into questions of whether fields that can't do experiments are "real" science, for example. It also assumes replicability is the only way science can't be "real" but there are some fields (e.g. COVID research!) where papers are usually replicable but that is meaningless because the methodology is unsound in other ways, i.e. you'd just be replicating their mistakes.
The biggest problems driving non-replicable research are the fact that so much "science" is now really just data analysis, and finding some spurious correlation that just about nudges over some arbitrary and very weak threshold for significance can be considered "science", even without anyone doing any kind of double check or followup. No real world experiment needs to be done at any point. And in some fields the connection to reality has been completely lost - public health is filled with papers that make predictions about the future trends in public data, and nobody ever follows up with papers that compute the correlation between the predictions and measured values. It would be easy, but they generally don't do it.
- fastaguy88 5y agoThere are several high visibility papers on lack of reproducibility in drug development by Pharma, so I don't think there is a particular bias in less reproducible research. Indeed, since life sciences research in academia is almost all funded by the NIH, with grant reviews/renewals every 3-5 years, there is probably more scrutiny of academic research than commercial.