Of course "burning it to the ground" is rhetoric and not meant literally. It is meant to convey though that "nice" and "gentle" solutions might not really be en

Of course "burning it to the ground" is rhetoric and not meant literally. It is meant to convey though that "nice" and "gentle" solutions might not really be enough here. Yes, for the most part the fixes have to be in terms of funding and incentives. Funding needs to be more careful, and more careful funding can be a carrot rather than a stick here. Re: incentives, IMO we clearly need a stick: there need to be harsh negative consequences for engaging in degenerate research programs and methods that have clearly been shown to result in pathological or cargo-cult science. Null-hypothesis significance testing is one clear practice that needs to go, but building entire fields on phony / meaningless uncalibrated metrics (think: a lot of self-report instruments that are never properly calibrated to objective outcomes or real-world behaviours and/or consequences, with results being reported only as standardized effect sizes) are another more pernicious practice permeating far too many fields. Ideological bias also needs to have funding consequences. Replication issues are still only surface problems in many fields, where the research would still all be worthless even if it replicated 100% perfectly. > Your analysis completely ignores the physical and biological sciences and the humanities I admitted later to painting with a broad brush, and yes, it is always hard to generalize and cover everything fairly. But IMO humanities has serious ideological and methodological rigor problems as well, and is overdue for disciplining. I would tend to have stronger positive feelings toward the biological sciences generally, yes. Yes, the social sciences are the major source of the problem (in part because they are so bad they tarnish the reputation of all academia). > These fields have gotten a lot better over the past decade in the wake of the replication crisis. Preregistration, publishing all code and data, reporting null findings, replicating results, etc. are becoming the norm. IMO "a lot better" is subjective, and I don't see those things as being the norm yet (beyond as lip-service), and the rate is far too slow. I agree we'll get there eventually, but I am worried about the loss of public trust and thus the production of real knowledge if we don't try a bit harder at this. Plus, globally, countries like China do seem to be more willing to actively crack down on research misconduct, at least in the past years, and it might not be unrelated to them increasingly pulling ahead technologically in many areas.