Wow. As a former social scientist with an axe to grind this hits hard.

I like to provide that HN community with some context as to what this means.

There are some 300 “research” departments in each of the major social sciences: psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology. If you believe what they say, about half of their mission is teaching and the other half is research. That’s a lot, tens of billions of dollars.

The nudge findings were among the few to not only reach the level of public knowledge but, more importantly, directly influence on public policy. To use the one I most familiar with: the so called default for defined contribution retirement plans, eg 401k. These government regs assumed, for good reason, that maximizing contributions was in the public interest. Based on the nudge findings, after much debate and effort, they were updated to dictate that the max options forms was pre selected in the brief it would cause more individuals would opt for that as opposed to contributing zero.

So far so good, right? In fact nudge has become a canonical example in introductory public policy courses as to how their research can in some sense make things better.

This meta-analytic finding turns on the authors’ method for measuring publication bias. Because I accept that, I must believe that this entire body of research, probably the signal behavioral economics work, is essentially worthless! Thus, all that effort has not only been wasted but the credibility of social science in general is damaged.

Adding this to the well/known gamesmanship in peer review, debate over tenure and etc. means it’s past time to reform a large chunk of academia.