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Comment by allthenews | Hacker News Reader

The entire premise behind so called scientific experimentation is reproducibility. It is what allowed humans to move past superstitions, demonstration of consistent causes and effects.

This is why economics, psychology, etc. are called "soft" sciences. This absolutely is a crisis, because by definition ALL of these experiments are supposed to be replicatable and reproduced before they can scientifically be taken as truths of any certainty, and we're seeing that many modern fields, particularly medical, are operating based on potentially dangerously misleading experimental results.

And, since this is HN, possibly even maliciously misleading.

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The crisis, then, is that people take results as truth before they've been replicated.

The more reasonable expectation is not that the results will be successfully replicated, but that the experiment can be replicated. In other words: That there is enough detail that someone else can try to confirm the results.

The problem is we've come to rely on first publication of results far too much. A first publication of a result should be seen as "here's an interesting result; someone please confirm." Not as "here are some new facts for you."

I’m no academic but I’ve read a few papers specifically because I wanted to implement what they talk about. None have been useful for this purpose. I don’t know how you can possibly replicate them if there is insufficient detail on the “apparatus”.

Or maybe, human psychology is too complicated with too many factors influencing results to be easily reproducible. The crisis is then more in the expectation you have and about initial small scale experiments being treated as "truth" and expected to work across cultures, social groups and social situations. Apple always falls down, but how people respond is sensitive to a lot of context.

Some of crisis are frauds or shaddy science (prison experiment). Some of it is the simplistic expectation that since experiments in basic physics are simple, psychology and sociology should be equally simple.

Lastly, these science are call soft, because they use less math and deal with fuzzy issues.

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