The reproducibility crisis in scientistry is even worse than we science skeptics had thought.
Science is facing a “reproducibility crisis” where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests. This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.
From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.
“The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable.
The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.
Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.
After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies’ findings.
Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result…. According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70{ca04638509ab7618004169842ba062d20ec7073b69e1f0489735ce6a44ff3be4} of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments.
Science is not a metric for truth or reality. One should NEVER rely upon scientists’ opinions about anything, because when science is actually reliable, we call it ENGINEERING.
When the gold standard is forty percent, you might as well rely upon flipping a coin.