> We believe that it is bad policy for journals like Science to publish big, bold ideas and then leave it to subfield journals to publish replications showing that those ideas aren’t so accurate after all.
The authors of the repudiation article are, without much doubt, trying to pick a fight.
However, the larger issue is whether they should be. The article has some good points in it, the comments here on HN also pull out some good point (and some bad ones), and the 'replication crisis' has been raging for almost a decade now with any sign of slacking. The authors are being jerks, I feel, but dammit, they make a good set of points.
Look, I've been there too. The deadlines just keep piling up, the students stay just as needy, and the grant funding is just getting harder and harder to find (esp for new PIs). A bunch of older white guys trying to be asshats on purpose over in the corner and then pointing things out for political points (my opinion) is just like: Dude, really?, screw right the hell off.
Its just another thing on the giant pile of crap that you can't deal with at all.
But, we all know that US based 'Big-S/R1' Science is not a healthy place. It's never really been one, but we all know it now, and, to me at least, it feels like it's not getting any healthier anytime soon. The scathing blog posts keep coming, the #MeToo issues keep getting swept aside, the flagrant abuse of grad students is getting worse.
Writing these guys off is not healthy and is not going to help. Yeah, they're kinda jerks. But we have to listen to them and take them just as seriously as anyone else. Their points are valid. They are right to call out Science magazine for not publishing recalcitrant papers and relegating them to journals that often have insane paywalls.
Yeah, I know, Science gets enough papers by 9am January 1st to run for the whole year and never see a drop in quality or impact. I've heard that exact same phrase from every journal editor, it's like 'live, laugh, love', it's 'basic' now. And it's a crap excuse.
Trying to shoe horn these jerks as 'alt right' or 'political' is not helping. Honestly, breaking Science up so that it would be able to publish these smaller repudiation articles would be better, and we all know the older PIs wouldn't let that happen, as their egos are tied up in the metrics too.
Brushing these jerks off isn't the right thing to do. Science, as a R1 type thingy, is heading for a meltdown in the US. We need to take these jerk-bags seriously, along with all the abused grad students, the new PIs, the people of color, the women, etc.