> After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things - but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. Not only is the argument from inevitability mistaken. Not only is it black-and-white thinking. It’s also cheems. Even if we can’t be perfect, it’s possible to be better - and that’s the kind of progressive message that all new scientists need to hear.

A layman’s perspective: While not necessarily because of politics, the replication crisis had made some, if not many, people very skeptical of psychology research and maybe the whole scientific enterprise as whole. Whenever someone brought up anything about science, they’ll link to some news about the replication crisis or some other flaws of the science, followed by preaching about how much of a sham science can be.

It’s not that skeptics don’t think there’s value in science. They might believe in science as a theory but not in its application. Evaluating the application of science can be very difficult and time-consuming especially for a layman. If the application of science is as flawless as its theory, we can just read the abstract and be done with it. But that’s not the reality, and people are expected to have a bevy of skills to read scientific papers. When they don’t have the skills and try to share their interpretation of the papers, you can expect someone criticising them (normally with a very adversarial tone) because of their incompetence, ignorance, blindness, biasses, etc. Because of the difficulty and intellectual battleground surrounding scientific paper discussions, some people would rather take the default route of not caring about or even denigrate science; the replication crisis is the best they could’ve hoped for to justify and bolster their positions.

The progressiveness espoused by the author shouldn’t be limited to scientists. Anyone interacting with science should try to read scientific papers even if they’re not some hotshot supposedly unbiased scientists. Similar to the scientists, non-scientists should also try to improve their objectivity, and not think that they should be supremely objective before they can read anything.