Reproducibility project fails to validate dozens of biomedical studies

The crisis in science can only be fixed by addressing the slew of bad incentives built into the system. We can't predicate job security, promotion and prestige of every early career scientist on publishing as many papers as possible, and on obtaining grants (which requires publishing as many papers as possible) and then expect high-quality science. We can't starve universities of public funding and expect them not to selectively hire scientists whose main skill is publishing hundreds of "exciting" papers, and not overproduce low-quality future "scientists" who were trained in the dark arts of academic survival. Reform is more urgent than ever; AI has essentially obsoleted the mental model that equates the count of published papers with productivity and quality.

I can't say this enough, independent reproduction must be a part of the process or we'll continue seeing this issue. As you say it's the incentives. One solution that's seems reasonably possible for 95+% of research would be to put 30% or so of the research funds locked away, to be then given to another team ideally at another university that get's access only to the original teams' publication and has the goal to reproduce the study. The vast majority of papers released don't contain enough information to actually repeat their work.

And since we are talking about science reform, let's start with the much easier and cheaper preregistration [1] which helps massively with publication bias.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(science)

Recently I read some lectures from Jacob Bronowski. If you never heard about him, he was sort of a predecessor of personalities like Bill Nye or Neil Tyson: he wrote books that popularize science, gave simplified introduction to philosophical and scientific topics etc.

He advocated (very naively, as it appears today) for science as a human endeavor that has no reason for falsification. His justification was that scientists have nothing to lose from being proved wrong, and, as an example, he gave some University dean who published some works that were shown to be completely wrong in a course of few decades, but still retained his position in a university (because his approach was valid and he never attempted to manipulate the truth, he just made an honest error).

But, the more I think about how did we come to this, in many human activities it is often the case that whoever undertook such activities relied on their own wealth and not being incentivized to commercialize their discoveries. It was the aristocrats or monks or some other occupation that made their life affordable, and boring enough for them to look for challenge in art or science. Once science became professional, it started to be incentivized in the same way any other vocation is: make more of it--be paid more; make more immediately useful things--be paid more.

I don't know if we should return to the lords and monks system :) But I'm also doubtful that we can make good progress by pulling the levers on financial incentives of commercializing science.

But why is lying so common in science?

Incentives like these exist in basically all areas of work. Perform well and you get "job security, promotion and prestige". Yet somehow there is no decade long ongoing crisis in industry of corporations lying about their products. When these cases happens (obviously they do), corporations and individuals get punished.

How would you reform the system? More funding definitely is not the answer.

How about punishment for terrible behavior. If you design bad experiments then why are you a researcher? Fired. If you commit fraud, fined and fired. Weed out these fuckers.

> why science in particular?

Because we can't usually measure our goals directly. We want outcomes like relativity and the two-slit experiment. Those results take a lot of time to uncover and have a meaningful chance of failure. If you look at an early-career scientist who hasn't produced (m)any papers, chances are they're fully qualified _and_ doing all the right things with respect to our society-level goals. However, that's hard to distinguish from outright fraud and freeloading from the outside, so we've imposed a crappy proxy measure, used for career advancement.

That's different from many jobs, where it's easy to measure incremental progress and where the results are more certain. You can directly weed out poor performers because you can watch them perform poorly.

> no decade long ongoing crisis of corporations lying about their products

Really? Flame retardants in our "food-grade" spatulas, lead leaching out from ceramic bowls into your soup and cereal, products "sold" as physical devices with a backdoor to start requiring a subscription years later, the pattern of building a brand on quality and then gutting the bill of materials to ramp up profits while deceiving customers into thinking it's the same thing, WalMart explicitly requiring manufacturers to not have any change in product numbers for the sub-par products sold there, .... Fraud is rampant, enough so that for most products I find it quite hard to actually make a sound purchasing decision, and those corporations seem to be wildly profitable.

> individuals get punished

That's true to an extent, but how many doc jockeys exist in some unimportant department in FAANG? You can have a very comfortable career skating by on minimal productive output when cause and effect for the business operate on sufficiently long timescales and with nonlocal, diffuse connections.

You mean like how tobacco company CEO's went to Congress telling them that there is no cancer risk? Oil companies pretending they didn't know about global warming? Shrinkflation? Corporations lie all the time and the people running them are never punished.

People in the UK can watch his TV series [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00wms4m/the-ascent-o...

I don't think you realise why researchers ended up in this situation.

You want to get a Phd? you have to publish something... anything.

You want money for experiments? You need publications even if you do the rest of the theoretical work on your own.

You want to get funds for some new or to continue some research? You need publications.

I'm not defending those that publish all sorts of crap as research but the whole system is rigged.

Everyone is asking for as many publications and citations as possible to even lend you a lab for 1 day to test something.

Excuse my language but what the f are you expecting?

Edit: formatting