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when I was getting my PhD in chemistry, the replication crisis had not been recognized (widely anyway). as it has become more widely discussed I've vacillated b
by chrisbrandow 5y ago
when I was getting my PhD in chemistry, the replication crisis had not been recognized (widely anyway). as it has become more widely discussed I've vacillated between annoyed that people don't make the distinction between the hard/simplef sciences and the fields that study much more complicated, multi-casual topics and being self critical that perhaps chemistry also suffers from a widespread problem.
I still don't know the answer but I suspect there is something to the simple/complicated distinction.
I do recall that there was this one professor that couldn't replicate his seminal work that basically got him tenure and it was all very dramatic. the kind of story that we would share with each other as a byword.
Aslo, I wonder if the errors get caught more quickly because in chemistry and physics to a degree, most progress is built directly on previous results. so you can't have bad results just floating unnoticed for very long.
- mateo1 5y agoThe thing is, mistakes will always be made and corrected. Maybe the experiment worked the first time because someone smoked in the room yesterday and a trace amount of contaminant made it in the solution and catalysed a reaction. Maybe your supplier had a minor contamination on your reactants. The reasons are endless. The issues I have with the "replication crisis" are two: malicious publishing of false results for personal or organisational profit, and malicious interpretation of prestigious publications as the one and only immutable truth. Both of which are social and political problems. Scientific publishing was functioning fine so far for the same reason the old internet was full of true information while it didn't have to: there was little to be gained by lying. Now that gov policies are build on phd papers, things are changing.