I want to be as optimistic as you, I do. At the moment I'm not though. My perception of things like the push for replication or pre-registration is not as a on

I want to be as optimistic as you, I do. At the moment I'm not though. My perception of things like the push for replication or pre-registration is not as a one-way ratchet towards progress, however slow moving, but more like pushing down on a blob of mercury. The problems aren't actually solved but simply get moved around by an academic community that deep down doesn't want to improve, only to create enough of an appearance of improving to dispel criticism. For example, there was a big push to give people access to the raw data. Researchers were made to sign data availability statements. The appearance of improvement was created. Then one day someone decided to test if these statements meant anything and discovered they did not; compliance was extremely low [1]. This seems to be how it goes. After over a decade of noise about P-hacking and low replicability in the social sciences, estimated replicability of studies has hardly changed, nor has statistical power improved much [2]. And these are the subtle problems that people don't mind talking about because the problems are sufficiently opaque enough that the general public doesn't pay much attention. During COVID we saw just how deep and serious bad science can get. Climatology isn't better. P-hacking is an irrelevant concern if you aren't even comparing your hypothesis to actual data to begin with (c.f. computational epidemiology), or if your response to a hypothesis/data mismatch is to edit the data (c.f. surface temperature datasets). Poor replicability is likewise irrelevant if the supposedly top researchers in a field can't implement a model that can even replicate its own outputs, and literally nobody anywhere within the institutions cares! The core problem here just doesn't seem to be something you can fix with this kind of incremental approach on top of the academic basis. You get the temporary appearance of progress in one or two fields where noise is being made, but it's fake and falls apart the moment someone examines it deeply or looks at a slightly different field. Ultimately, academia doesn't institutionally care if the output of its professors is correct, only that output happens and gets attention. You can't fix this by requiring more forms to be filled out; these people are smart and have all day to find workarounds. For as long as their position and status in society revolves around creating mass/public perception that they're doing intelligent work, vs actual hard-nosed evaluation of said work by independent but deeply interested outsiders (e.g. companies that want to build things), we will continue to be disappointed by the failure of reform efforts. [1] https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(22)00141-X/pdf https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(22)00141-X/pdf [2] https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#Things-Are-Not-Getting-Better https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...