> I would assume that most important results are replicated. GP is pointing out that the incentive structure makes this an invalid assumption. If publications

> I would assume that most important results are replicated. GP is pointing out that the incentive structure makes this an invalid assumption. If publications reward hype and novelty when deciding what to publish, then there is no point spending your limited resources replicating other peoples' results, they won't get published anyway. And experiments that give a null result won't be published anyway. What's left are one-off results that showed something surprising simply by chance and don't replicate...but then, we generally will never know that they don't replicate, because the replication experiment is not novel, has a low chance of being published, and hence isn't worth spending limited resources on. Basically the publication process introduces selection bias into the types of research that are even attempted, which then filters down into the conclusions we take from it. A cornerstone of the scientific method is random sampling, but as long as the results that get disseminated are chosen by a non-random process, it introduces bias.