I would like to think that the truly important papers receive some sort of additional validation before people start to build lives and livelihoods on them, but I’ve also seen some pretty awful citation chains where an initial weak result gets overegged by downstream papers which drop mention of its limitations.

For central limit theorem to hold, the random variables must be (independently and identically dustributed) i.i.d. How do we know our samples are i.i.d.? We can only show if they are not

Add to that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_...

We've got to do better or science will stagnate

To my mind there is a nasty pressure that exists for some professions/careers, where publishing becomes essential. Because it’s essential, standards are relaxed and barriers lowered, leading to the lower quality work being published. Publishing isn’t done in response to genuine discovery or innovation, it’s done because boxes need to be checked. Publishers won’t change because they benefit from this system, authors won’t change because they’re bound to the system.

Reproducing ML Robotics papers requires the exact robot/environment/objects/etc -> people fudge their numbers and have strawman implementation of benchmarks.

LLMs are so expensive to train + the datasets are non-public -> Meta trained on the test set for Llama4 (and we wouldn't have known if not for some forum leak).

In some way it's no different than startups or salesmen overpromising - it's just lying for personal gain. The truth usually wins in the end though.

That's not how it works. Science is hard, experiment design is hard, and a failure to reproduce could mean a bunch of different things. It could mean the original research failed to mention something critical, or you had a fluke, or you didn't understand the process right, or something about YOUR setup is unknowingly different. Or the process itself is somewhat stochastic.

This goes 10X for such difficult sciences as psychology (which is literally still in infancy) and biology. In these fields, designing a proper experiment (controlling as much as you can) is basically impossible, so we have to tease signal out of noise and it's failure prone.

Hell, go watch Youtube Chemists who have Phds fail to reproduce old papers. Were those papers fraudulent? No, science is just difficult and failure prone.

If you treat "Paper published in Nature/Science" as a source of truth, you will regularly be wrong. Scientists do not do that. Nature is a magazine, and is a business, and sees themselves as trying to push the cutting edge of research, and they will happily publish an outright fraudulent paper if there is even the slightest chance it might be valid, and especially if it would be really cool if it's right.

When discussing how Jan Hendrik Schön got tens of outright fraudulent papers into Nature despite nobody being able to even confirm he ran any experiments, they said that "even false papers can push the field forward". One of the scientists who investigated and helped Schon get fired even said that peer review is no indicator of quality or correctness. Peer review wasn't even a formal part of science publishing until the 60s.

Science is "self correcting" because if the "effect" you saw isn't real, nobody will be able to build off your work. Alzheimer's Amyloid research has been really unproductive, which is how we knew it probably wasn't the magic bullet even before it had fraud scandals.

If you doubt this, look to China. They have ENORMOUS amounts of explicit fraud in their system, as well as a MUCH WORSE "publish or perish" state. Would you suggest it has slowed them down?

Stop trying to outsource your critical thinking to an authority. You cannot do science without publishing wrong or false papers. If you are reading about "science" in a news article, press release, or advertisement, you don't know science. I am continually flabbergasted by how often "Computer Scientists" don't even know the basics of the scientific method.

Scientists understood there was a strong link between cigarettes and cancer at least 20 years before we had comprehensive scientific studies to "prove" it.

That said, there are good things to do to mitigate the harms that "publish or perish" causes, like preregistration and an incentive to publish failed experiments, even though science progressed pretty well for 400 years without them. These reproducibility projects are great, but do not mistake their "these papers failed" as "these papers were written fraudulently, or by bad scientists, or were a waste".

Good programmers WILL ship bugs sometimes. Good scientists WILL publish papers that don't pan out. These are truths of human processes and imperfect systems.

A lot of things, in fact, do work. Hence, modern science producing so much despite this reproducibility crisis being even worse in decades past.

The most common crime they commit is fraud, the 2nd. most common one is sexual harassment, while the third one would be plagiarism, although this one might not necessarily be punishable depending on the jurisdiction.

(IMO. I can't provide data on that and I'm not willing to prosecute them personally, if that breaks the deal for you, that's ok to me.)

I know academia like the palm of my hand and have been everywhere around the world, it's the same thing all over. I can speak loudly about it because I'm catholic and have money, so those lowlives can't touch me :D.

Every single time this topic comes up, there's a lot of resistance from "the public" who is willing to go to great lengths to defend "the academics" even though they know absolutely nothing about academic life and their only grasp of it was created through TV and movies.

Anyone who has been involved in Academia for more than like 2 years can tell you the exact same thing. That doesn't mean they're also rotten, I'm just saying they've seen all these things taking place around.

We should really move the overton window around this topic so that scientists are held to the same public scrutiny as everybody else, like public officials, because btw. 9 out of 10 times they are being funded by public money. They should be held accountable, there should be jail for the offenders.

1: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/criminal

Even Einstein tried to find flaws in his own theories. This is how science should actually work.

We need to actively try and falsify theories and beliefs. Only if we fail to falsify, the theories should be considered valid.