Not in the "hard" sciences: my background is physics, and there are lots of papers on "failed studies", which serve to constrain the domain of applicability of some theory or other. Or, better yet, indicate new science to be found.
The authors note the bias in the survey: "Our survey was not a scientific poll. For one, the respondents disproportionately hailed from the biomedical and social sciences and English-speaking communities."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science#Criticis...
Now the word "science" somehow means "legitimate and respectable research". What's worse, it's not the reality of these fields but a distortion of reality through verbal association, and the word "science" is slowly being dragged into mud due to non-reproducible or downright wrong published results thanks to many such fields of "science".
I should also add that mere "data fitting and data extrapolation" with no basic theory of fundamental understanding isn't science either.
If you're curious about the details, Feynman has defined the issue very well at some point
But it turns out that it's worth applying the scientific method to these fields, so what you're left with are tough choices. To deal with these problems the way we would in a physics experiment would be prohibitively expensive, in the literal sense of prohibitive. You have to come to terms with the fact that you can only afford to get enough data that there's a non-negligible possibility of being misled. It's worth doing science here, and we can, but it's just plain hard. I didn't appreciate that before I started having to deal with it. Don't blame the subject for some practitioners' failings.
http://www.nature.com/news/computer-gleans-chemical-insight-...
The root problem is cost. We have to make science cheaper. We have to put it back in the hands of the curious and adventurous. Science should be possible by anyone - even teenagers. If science can't be done by the young, the poor, the autodidacts, what's the point?
Currently, everyone is on the 'teach everyone programming' kick. U.S. states are now starting to require that everyone learns programming. But, what about science? Let's create the 'github' of science - where anyone with a hypothesis can create a notebook, gather up like-minded people to collaborate, gather data, analyze it, 'fork' others' research into new areas. That's how we will make it cheaper and accessible.
There are still a handful of areas where amateurs could in theory do proper research without spending a few million dollars on lab equipment - ecology for example. But then we get to the problem of necessary knowledge: it take a few years of hard study until you even know the right questions to ask, which ones have already been asked, and how to interpret the results that you get.
In short: there is no short cut to modern science.
It gives me hope that we have started talking about these things - at least in academia (as numerous think-pieces in Nature et al. testify). We need to continue this discussion, make the public aware of it, and then start taking steps to solve it. No, science is not doomed, but boy do we still have a lot of work to do to get it to where it should be...
And got one, just not the one I expected.
There are multiple crises in science these days, whether of communication or recruitment or replication or of fraud or of anti-intellectualism fueled in part by the most egregious examples of these problems.
Fixing these problems, addressing these seven, would do much to restore the lustre and respect and authority science well done and scientists working well deserve.
For one, the government is becoming increasingly weak while corporations are becoming increasingly powerful.
Unlike the government, corporations in general (and their investment strategies) are focused on short term results - That's how executive pay/bonuses are structured - CEOs don't want to invest in something that will only bear fruit in 10 years so that some future CEO will get all the credit for it. Humans are terrible at allocating credit/praise because we like to pretend that the universe is simple and that all actions have simple, predictable effects without unexpected side-effects.
Science research cannot exist in a corporate environment. Science can only rely on government or philanthropy.
And speaking of open science, making research public as it's happening (not even results, just what you're studying) can help prevent redundant concurrent studies in multiple labs and facilitate collaboration, also making the most of the limited funding scientists have.
Pachyderm (disclaimer: my company) is building infrastructure tools to help data scientists reproduce results by offering "Git for Data."
What about legislation requiring that any unclassified government funded science be available outside a paywall? Last I saw a figure for it, the combined budgets of all of the US military bands was ~$270 million a year. I bet a lot of science publication could be "nationalized" for that amount.
2. Poor design. Competence issue.
3. Replication. Incentive issue.
4. Peer review. Bad old analog system.
5. Paywalls. Capitalism.
6. Poor communication. Competence issue.
7. Stress. Personal issue.
Nothing gets in the way of science except ourselves.
Psychology and Climate change are in different categories. The crisis of reproducibility in soft sciences has nothing to do with the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of global warming.
Many mentioned issues are real in hard science too but it just an example that you can lie with the truth. Perverse incentives, publication bias, imperfection of peer review, etc can't invalidate established results e.g., Newtonian physics continues to work in the domain it is applicable for.
It is infuriating that the planet (planetary habitability) is destroyed for the benefit of the very few.
I think you really missed the point of the article. Of course the problems the author talks about don't invalidate already established results, the big deal is that they potentially prevent new results from being soundly established (or discarded if necessary)!
"Climate change" is "fossil fuel"-friendly alternative to avoid saying "Global warming" for what is happening. It is disingenuous to suggests that "Global warming" is unrelated to the article.
The article equates the certainty with which we know results in Psychology and Climate change (the terms are separated by commas as you've noticed). Psychology has a very flimsy foundation: even major results can be debunked (e.g., ego depletion). On the other hand there is no doubt that the climate change (global warming) is happening.
The article can be used as a tool by climate change deniers. They could say: "science have many major issues and therefore climate change is a figment of these communist eggheads imagination."
