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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3775 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Last week on twitter I went to a website with a huge list of scientific studies that had failed to replicate or had mixed results. Annoyingly, googling "list of studies that failed to replicate" mostly gives me news articles with "5, 10 or 15 studies that failed to replicate!" Did anyone else see this and know what I'm talking about? I just want to bookmark it for future use.

Biggest cause of the replication crisis is that investigating something and finding nothing is very low status in the sciences. Testing a hypothesis and finding nothing is very useful information for future scientists / the field, and people pay lip service to supporting/publishing failure study outcomes. In practice, though, nobody cares and nobody gets promoted for not proving something and so academics are very strongly incentivized to bullshit.

Was it this?

yes, perfect! thanks!

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