The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science
The site is down so I can&#x27;t read the original report, but I&#x27;ve read reports on this topic in the past so I&#x27;m going to chime in with some &quot;usual suspects&quot; caveats:<p>1.  No result is 100% reproducible because you can never completely reproduce the conditions of any experiment.  The best you can hope to do is to reproduce the conditions that <i>matter</i>, but enumerating those has to be part of the theory you are testing, and so you can never be 100% sure that you have a complete list.<p>2.  Even a completely non-reproducible result can be scientifically significant.  For example, celestial events are almost never reproducible.  Our understanding of celestial mechanics nonetheless rests on solid science.<p>3.  The end-product of science is not truth, it is <i>explanations</i> of observations.  Those observations can (indeed must) include non-reproducible ones.  Sometimes the explanation of non-reproducible results is &quot;experimental error&quot; or &quot;delusion&quot; or &quot;we just don&#x27;t know.&quot;  But non-reproducible events are nonetheless within the purview of science.<p>On the other hand...<p>4.  The statistical tests currently in widespread use as a criterion for publication in peer-reviewed journals <i>guarantee</i> that <i>at least</i> one result in 20 will be due to chance and not because the hypothesis being tested is actually true.  That, combined with the suppression of negative results, guarantees that the results published in scientific journals that adhere to those standards <i>will</i> be unreliable.  But that doesn&#x27;t really have anything to do with reproducibility <i>per se</i>, it has to do with the fact that the journals use a weak criterion for defining positive results.  That, combined with our human predilection to value positive results over negative ones and the understandable desire of scientists to advance their careers, all but guarantees that journals will contain many defensible but false results.  But this is not because of a lack of reproducibility per se, it&#x27;s because of poor policy choices.