I don't think it was wasted. It's well invested capital and time to find out whether something is true or not
That's how science work. No matter what we do to discourage fraud, we'll always invest tons of capital and time to find and filter it out.
That's how science work. No matter what we do to discourage fraud, we'll always invest tons of capital and time to find and filter it out.
Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between both but of there is a track record of fraud no reputable journal should accept more papers from that source.
Edit: As I re-read my comment I worry because research should not really depend on "prestige", it should be based on cold facts. On the other hand I don't see any other way to deal with malicious actors.
It's absurd to think there will be a way to know which studies need reproduction or not. The whole purpose of reproducing is to find out which ones are true and which are bogus
But it was known not to be true, and so people were sent under false pretenses to go and reproduce and verify it. That is far from well invested.
We will always need to invest in finding error and fraud, no matter how we perceive scientists honesty.
The moment we stop doing these investment, we're doomed.
Unpossible!
We need to reproduce every single study, including the fraudulent ones. Gosh, ESPECIALLY the fraudulent ones.
But we can't possibly know in advance which are which. That's the whole purpose of trying to reproduce.
Without reproduction efforts, scientific papers are of no value, as we can't trust them.
In this sense, a paper without reproduction effort is not a "window" in the analogy. Only after reproduction efforts it becomes a window.
So saying it's a waste to try reproducing an article is just absurd. It's like saying it's a waste to produce the "window" in the first place because a kid might break it in the future (in case of the paper, that we might figure out the paper was fraudulent).
It's still valuable to find out a paper was fraudulent. It builds trust in the whole scientific endeavor.
The overall process assumes trustworthiness. The better that assumption holds, the better science performs.
The general presumption would tend to be that other scientists are trying to do good, honest work. Scientific progress does better when that presumption turns out to be more true.
To be clear, I was responding to their apparent disregard for the harm done by the original alleged-fraud.
But it's reasonable to think that some reproduction is better than no reproduction.
The point I think folks were contesting was the tone some may've inferred from [this comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30787447 ), which may sound a bit like downplaying the damage caused by fraud under the premise that reproduction ought to catch such things anyway.
For a computing analogy, TCP uses mechanisms that enable it to tolerate packet-loss. But packet-loss still slows things down, limiting bandwidth and increasing latency, until a connection would be impractical. For a connection with many hops, even a small packet-loss-rate along each hop would be a huge problem, even though TCP actively checks for packet-loss and tries to fix it.
Likewise, science-with-replication presumably ought to be able to fix a lot of fraud and errors -- but those problems take a heavy, debilitating toll on scientific progress; it's not a small problem that replication-studies alone could satisfactorily rectify.
The real damage would have been everyone believing the paper conclusions were solid and start to act according to this false belief.
Reproduction efforts saved us from that damage.
These efforts were not the damage.
Whoever is seeing differently doesn't understand one of the basic foundations of how the scientific endeavor works.
And again: anyone expecting a world where there are no dishonest scientists or where the dishonest ones call themselves out in advance to save from the "damage" of people spending time reproducing their papers, is just playing wishful thinking, which is not a recipe for success...
I'm pretty sure everyone firmly agrees with this.
So I agree with OP the time wasn't wasted, but it could have been spent on better opportunities.
You can't flag "this scientist is honest, never reproduce anything from him anymore". He can turn dishonest the next day you do this.
If there are more dishonest scientists, we'll just find more useless papers. But the time to reproduce will be the same.