It’s real. From Nature:
Survey sheds light on the ‘crisis’ rocking research.
More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature’s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.
The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.More.
Excuse me. In community medicine, this is called “denial.”
1. We don’t know if it is true.
2. In a situation that matters, we believe it anyway, to show our loyalty!
= “Officer, I noticed he couldn’t easily get the keys into the ignition, but I had faith he had stopped drinking. I won’t be charged, will I?”
Incidentally, professed skeptic Michael Shermer used to hold forth on the glories of peer review as the gold standard of science. But even he recently heard the hundredth shoe drop. Heck, there might be hope instead of just hype.
See also: Nature tries to referee Horgan vs. the skeptics
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