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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

That's not new, especially in natural sciences 90%+ of the experiments cannot be replicated.

Do you mean in the social sciences? The natural sciences are physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and biology. These fields of inquiry lend themselves to empiricism. Mistakes/fraud happen, but it's a lot better than social science where empiricism is routinely rejected (straining the claim to even be science at all.)

Even in hard sciences such as physics, there is a problem where not many researchers have access to instruments used in the published result, or even if they do, it's just too expensive to do it just to replicate (low return on investment).

No I mean natural sciences too, I am a former photovoltaics researcher and know for a fact most articles in the field to be dubious. I have dedicated the first 4 months of my master thesis replicating an experiment wihich could not be replicated because I later found the author cooked the numbers declaring an open circuit voltage that was impossible to obtain.

That sounds surprising to me. Do you have a source where I could read more?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The footnote provided[1] for this sentence in the intro does not actually mention the word "natural":

  Data strongly indicate that other natural, and social sciences are affected as well.

It only writes that physicists and chemists are the most confident in their fields' results, and that a biochemistry graduate student is complaining about the effort it takes to replicate results.

It also writes that 70+% of researchers have failed to replicate an experiment. But that is very far from saying that 70+% of all experiments don't replicate. And the figure given by parent is 90+%.

The Prevalence section of the Wikipedia page talks about psychology, medicine, economics, and other social sciences. Medicine is arguably a natural science. But parent’s comment made me think it’s referring to results in physics or chemistry.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

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