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Unfortunately as you spend more time investigating this problem it becomes clear that replication studies aren't the answer. They're a bandage over the bleeding

Unfortunately as you spend more time investigating this problem it becomes clear that replication studies aren't the answer. They're a bandage over the bleeding but don't address the root causes, and would have nearly no impact even if funded at a much larger scale. Because this suggestion comes up in every single HN thread about scientific fraud I eventually wrote an essay on why this is the case: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... (press escape to dismiss the banner). If you're really interested in the topic please read it but here's a brief summary: • Replication studies don't solve many of the most common types of scientific fraud. Instead, you just end up replicating the fraud itself. This is usually because the methodology is bad, but if you try to fix the methodology to be scientific the original authors just claim you didn't do a genuine replication. • Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. It's not clear what happens to the money if someone gets funded to replicate such a paper. Today it's not a problem because replicators choose which papers to replicate themselves, it's not a systematic requirement. • The idea implicitly assumes that very few researchers are corrupt thus the replicators are unlikely to also be. This isn't the case because replication failures are often due to field-wide problems, meaning replications will be done by the same insiders who benefit from the status quo and who signed off on the bad papers in the first place. This isn't an issue today because the only people who do replication studies are genuinely interested in whether the claims are true, it's not just a procedural way to get grant monies. • Many papers aren't worth replicating because they make trivial claims. If you punish non-replication without fixing the other incentive problems, you'll just pour accelerant on the problem of academics making obvious claims (e.g. the average man would like to be more muscular), and that just replaces one trust destroying problem with another. Replication failure is a symptom not a cause. The cause is systematically bad incentives.

boxed 2y ago
Incentives are themselves dangerous. We should treat incentives like guns. Instead we apply incentives to all manner of problems and are surprised they backfire and destroy everything. You have to give people less incentives and more just time to do their basic job.
- foldr 2y ago
  I think this hits the nail on the head. Academics have been treated like assembly line workers for decades now. So they’ve collectively learned how to consistently place assembled product on the conveyor belt. The idea that scientific output is a stack of publications is pretty absurd if you think about it for a few minutes. But try telling that to the MBA types who now run universities.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    You do need to incentivize something. If you incentivize nothing that's the same thing as an institution not existing and science being done purely as a hobby. You can get some distance that way - it's how science used to work - but the moment you want the structure and funding an institution can provide you must set incentives. Otherwise people could literally just stop turning up for work and still get paid, which is obviously not going to be acceptable to whoever is funding it.
    - foldr 2y ago
      I think it’s an interesting feature of current culture that we take it as axiomatic that people need to be ‘incentivized’. I’m not sure I agree. To me that axiom seems to be at the root of a lot of the problems we’re talking about in this thread. (Yes, everyone is subject to incentives in some broad sense, but acknowledging that doesn’t mean that we have to engineer specific incentives as a means to desired outcomes.)
      - krisoft 2y ago
        I think there is some misunderstanding here. Incentives are not some special thing you can opt to not do. Who do you hire to do science? When do you give them a raise? Under which circumstances do you fire them? Who gets a nicer office? There are a bunch of scientist each clamouring for some expensive equipment (not necessarily the same one) who gets their equipment and who doesn't? Scientist wants to travel to a conference, who can travel and where can they travel? We have a bunch of scientist working together who can tell the other what to do and what not to do? Depending on your answers to these questions you set one incentive structure or an other. If you hire and promote scientist based on how nicely they do interpretive dance you will get scientist who dances very well. If you hire and promote scientist based on how articulate they are about their subject matters you will get very well spoken scientist. If you don't hire anybody then you will get approximately nobody doing science (or only independently wealthy dabbling here and there out of boredom.) If you pay a lot to the scientist who do computer stuff, but approximately no money to people who do cell stuff you will get a lot of computer scientist and no cell scientist. Maybe that is what you want, maybe not. These don't happen from one day to an other. You are not going to get more "cancer research" tomorrow out of the existing cancer researchers if you hike their salary 100 fold today. But on the order of decades you will definitely see much much more (or much less) people working on the problem.
gadders 2y ago
>>>• Replication studies don't solve many of the most common types of scientific fraud. Instead, you just end up replicating the fraud itself. This is usually because the methodology is bad, but if you try to fix the methodology to be scientific the original authors just claim you didn't do a genuine replication. >>>• Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. It's not clear what happens to the money if someone gets funded to replicate such a paper. Today it's not a problem because replicators choose which papers to replicate themselves, it's not a systematic requirement. Isn't this what peer review is for?
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Yes but it only works if the field has consistently high standards and the team violating them is an outlier. In a surprisingly large number of cases replications are hard/impossible because the entire field has adopted non-replicable techniques.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> • Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. This is indeed a problem. But it can be solved by journals not accepting any paper that is not 1) described in such a way that it can be fully replicated, and 2) include the code and the data used to generate the published results Just that would go a long way. And then fund replication studies for consequential papers. Not just because of fraud but because of unintended flaws in studies, which can happen of course.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Journals can't police academia because their customers are university libraries. It's just not going to happen: journals are so far gone that they routinely publish whole editions filled with fake AI generated content and nobody even notices, so expecting them to enforce scientific rigor on the entire grant-funded science space is a non-starter ... and very indirect. Why should journals do this anyway? It's the people paying who should be checking that the work is done to a sufficient standard.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    You’re right but it’s what journals are supposed to do - that’s why we pay. Otherwise we don’t need journals and everyone can just self publish to bioRxiv.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      They'll only do it if the customers demand it. But the customers are universities, if they cared they could just fix the problem at the source by auditing and validating studies themselves. They don't need to pay third parties to do it. Journals often don't have sufficient lab access to detect fraud anyway. I do think the journal ecosystem can just disappear and nobody would care. It only exists to provide a pricing mechanism within the Soviet-style planned economy that academia has created. If that's replaced by a different pricing mechanism academic publishing could be rapidly re-based on top of Substack blogs and nothing of value would be lost.

boxed 2y ago

Incentives are themselves dangerous. We should treat incentives like guns. Instead we apply incentives to all manner of problems and are surprised they backfire and destroy everything. You have to give people less incentives and more just time to do their basic job.

foldr 2y ago
I think this hits the nail on the head. Academics have been treated like assembly line workers for decades now. So they’ve collectively learned how to consistently place assembled product on the conveyor belt. The idea that scientific output is a stack of publications is pretty absurd if you think about it for a few minutes. But try telling that to the MBA types who now run universities.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  You do need to incentivize something. If you incentivize nothing that's the same thing as an institution not existing and science being done purely as a hobby. You can get some distance that way - it's how science used to work - but the moment you want the structure and funding an institution can provide you must set incentives. Otherwise people could literally just stop turning up for work and still get paid, which is obviously not going to be acceptable to whoever is funding it.
  - foldr 2y ago
    I think it’s an interesting feature of current culture that we take it as axiomatic that people need to be ‘incentivized’. I’m not sure I agree. To me that axiom seems to be at the root of a lot of the problems we’re talking about in this thread. (Yes, everyone is subject to incentives in some broad sense, but acknowledging that doesn’t mean that we have to engineer specific incentives as a means to desired outcomes.)
    - krisoft 2y ago
      I think there is some misunderstanding here. Incentives are not some special thing you can opt to not do. Who do you hire to do science? When do you give them a raise? Under which circumstances do you fire them? Who gets a nicer office? There are a bunch of scientist each clamouring for some expensive equipment (not necessarily the same one) who gets their equipment and who doesn't? Scientist wants to travel to a conference, who can travel and where can they travel? We have a bunch of scientist working together who can tell the other what to do and what not to do? Depending on your answers to these questions you set one incentive structure or an other. If you hire and promote scientist based on how nicely they do interpretive dance you will get scientist who dances very well. If you hire and promote scientist based on how articulate they are about their subject matters you will get very well spoken scientist. If you don't hire anybody then you will get approximately nobody doing science (or only independently wealthy dabbling here and there out of boredom.) If you pay a lot to the scientist who do computer stuff, but approximately no money to people who do cell stuff you will get a lot of computer scientist and no cell scientist. Maybe that is what you want, maybe not. These don't happen from one day to an other. You are not going to get more "cancer research" tomorrow out of the existing cancer researchers if you hike their salary 100 fold today. But on the order of decades you will definitely see much much more (or much less) people working on the problem.

gadders 2y ago

>>>• Replication studies don't solve many of the most common types of scientific fraud. Instead, you just end up replicating the fraud itself. This is usually because the methodology is bad, but if you try to fix the methodology to be scientific the original authors just claim you didn't do a genuine replication. >>>• Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. It's not clear what happens to the money if someone gets funded to replicate such a paper. Today it's not a problem because replicators choose which papers to replicate themselves, it's not a systematic requirement. Isn't this what peer review is for?

mike_hearn 2y ago
Yes but it only works if the field has consistently high standards and the team violating them is an outlier. In a surprisingly large number of cases replications are hard/impossible because the entire field has adopted non-replicable techniques.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> • Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. This is indeed a problem. But it can be solved by journals not accepting any paper that is not 1) described in such a way that it can be fully replicated, and 2) include the code and the data used to generate the published results Just that would go a long way. And then fund replication studies for consequential papers. Not just because of fraud but because of unintended flaws in studies, which can happen of course.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Journals can't police academia because their customers are university libraries. It's just not going to happen: journals are so far gone that they routinely publish whole editions filled with fake AI generated content and nobody even notices, so expecting them to enforce scientific rigor on the entire grant-funded science space is a non-starter ... and very indirect. Why should journals do this anyway? It's the people paying who should be checking that the work is done to a sufficient standard.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  You’re right but it’s what journals are supposed to do - that’s why we pay. Otherwise we don’t need journals and everyone can just self publish to bioRxiv.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    They'll only do it if the customers demand it. But the customers are universities, if they cared they could just fix the problem at the source by auditing and validating studies themselves. They don't need to pay third parties to do it. Journals often don't have sufficient lab access to detect fraud anyway. I do think the journal ecosystem can just disappear and nobody would care. It only exists to provide a pricing mechanism within the Soviet-style planned economy that academia has created. If that's replaced by a different pricing mechanism academic publishing could be rapidly re-based on top of Substack blogs and nothing of value would be lost.