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Comment by asylteltine | Hacker News Reader

I don’t trust anything coming out of academia anymore. First we had over 50% of psychology being nonsense, then sociology (not surprising), then the hard sciences too. But then we also have the rampant ideology problem where you are forbidden from even researching certain topics/questions and if you do, you are blacklisted. They need a hard reckoning. What happened to science? Who cares what the ideological implication is? The truth is the truth.

The icing on the cake is when these frauds retract their papers, NOTHING happens to them. Nothing.

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Academia publishes, because academics are forced to publish. Psychology has a subject that's harder than physics, both experimentally and theoretically, and bad research practices. Sociology we can politely ignore. So yes, it has turned into a mill that produces garbage.

Still, some things are worth researching, but finding out what's true (or true-ish) will take a lot of time. Don't trusting findings that haven't been reproduced, stay skeptical of theories that hinge on a far-reaching interpretation of the data, and downright ignore publications with surprising claims. It's not nice, but it's realistic.

Hold on, I've heard of the replication crisis - though I don't know the scale - but are you saying that over 50% of "hard science" is bunk? I find that hard to swallow.

Not addressing the parent's specific claim, but there was recent discussion of a disturbingly high proportion of studies in one field being fake/flawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37572394

> "For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And in 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data."

I don’t think hard sciences are 50% but still too high. But that’s just the data people looked at. There are so many papers and studies being submitted, who knows how many times a researcher fudged a few values to make the effect size bigger? I personally witnessed this in academia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

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