Checks are good, definitely. And they help to limit the damage caused by stuff like fraud. You were right about that stuff. The point I think folks were cont

Checks are good, definitely. And they help to limit the damage caused by stuff like fraud. You were right about that stuff. The point I think folks were contesting was the tone some may've inferred from [this comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30787447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30787447 ), which may sound a bit like downplaying the damage caused by fraud under the premise that reproduction ought to catch such things anyway. For a computing analogy, TCP uses mechanisms that enable it to tolerate packet-loss. But packet-loss still slows things down, limiting bandwidth and increasing latency, until a connection would be impractical. For a connection with many hops, even a small packet-loss-rate along each hop would be a huge problem, even though TCP actively checks for packet-loss and tries to fix it. Likewise, science-with-replication presumably ought to be able to fix a lot of fraud and errors -- but those problems take a heavy, debilitating toll on scientific progress; it's not a small problem that replication-studies alone could satisfactorily rectify.