> I’ve long said it’s much more useful to think of the replication crisis as a generalization crisis, I haven't bothered to follow the psychology discussion of

> I’ve long said it’s much more useful to think of the replication crisis as a generalization crisis, I haven't bothered to follow the psychology discussion of this, but I did follow the cancer research attempt to claim a replication crisis. The article that most people cite is an editorial where pharma researchers try to "replicate" studies by taking "landmark" studies (that were not revealed), and then do drug development off the findings of these initial papers. Now, sure, if cancer were so simple that surprising new cell behaviors could be used to develop drugs that target lots of different cancers, that would be fantastic. But that sort of generalization should never be expected, it's just silly. If somebody finds a new cellular behavior in a handful of cell lines or animal models or tumor biopsies, there's no reason to think it will generalize. The point of the primary literature is to document the primary evidence. It's not a textbook, with highly generalized scientific principles, it's the messy discovery phase of science where scientists are communicating findings that they can build upon to eventually build a body of work that could become a generalized principle. A single paper should never constitute the basis of an entire drug development program. I think that a lot of the "replication" crisis is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific literature works and how it's used by the intended audience.