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Biological systems being complicated and unintuitive is an excellent explanation for slow or no progress. It's entirely orthogonal to the question of why publis

Biological systems being complicated and unintuitive is an excellent explanation for slow or no progress. It's entirely orthogonal to the question of why published results are not reproducible, misleading, or wrong. If some problem is super hard that explains why I can't answer it, it doesn't explain why I continually publish fake answers. My understanding of the situation is that academics and scientists work in a weird bureaucracy, there is an incentive to publish, academics are very bad at detecting fraud and worse at punishing it and statistical manipulation is easy and endemic. These things explain why there's so much academic research that can't be reproduced and why some academic fields are basically the modern equivalent of astrology.

niemandhier 4y ago
You only notice the cases where you try to reproduce things, and time being limited ,you only reproduce obscure results. As a comparison: I did a bunch of math too and in some cases just accepted the proofs I build on. Same for programming: I neither audited lapac not GCC. For the engineering crowd software dependencies are a probably a good comparison. If they come from a credible source you trust them and build on top of them. Nobody blames companies for not auditing the kernel if there is a security problem in it, but everybody screams: “You should have verified the result”, if some paper is redracted.