> never, ever would have happened in a hard science If only! Cancer biology has also struggled mightily with replicability, as has machine learning. Amgen cou

> never, ever would have happened in a hard science If only! Cancer biology has also struggled mightily with replicability, as has machine learning. Amgen could only replicate about half of the published findings in their reproducibility project; I’ve reviewed MLmreplications and the rate isn’t much better. Some of this is undoubtedly for petty reasons—-people run bad experiments, or put their thumb on the scale to get a particular result. However, another major issue is that the “soft” sciences are actually quite hard. There are a million factors that might affect how an organism responds in a test. We often can’t control for all of them, and may not even know what they are. In a sense, electrons are easier to study. They’re all exactly identical, they only interact with each other in a few simple ways, and they don’t care at all about what you, the experimenter, might want or expect. Every patient (or rat) is unique and susceptible to all kinds of influences based on their interactions with each other, the experimenter, and the rest of the world. In that sense, the “replication crisis” just means we’re slowly and awkwardly discovering what matters.