Far too many science findings can’t be reproduced in other experiments, so fields can’t advance.

At Greg Lukianoff’s Eternally Radical Idea Substack, a recent article by Robert Shibley — a lawyer specializing in civil rights on campus — touched on this problem:

By 2020, Vox was reporting that “[r]esearchers have discovered, over and over, that lots of findings in fields like psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics don’t hold up when other researchers try to replicate them,” pointing out that “a decade of talking about the replication crisis hasn’t translated into a scientific process that’s much less vulnerable to it.”

Why not? The bias towards publishing novel or headline-grabbing results, coupled with the lack of reward for replicating studies or publishing null results, is the most remarked-upon factor. It’s undoubtedly a big contributor, and as a systemic problem conveniently can’t be blamed on any one person. Unfortunately, that excuse doesn’t fly nearly as well when applied to an influential institution like Harvard, which could have acted to fix the problem by changing these broken incentives, setting an example that other schools would be highly likely to follow.

That didn’t happen.

Compounding this problem is that nearly every field suffers from an enforced political consensus on certain issues that are highly controversial and should be the subject of robust academic debate, but aren’t.

“Is Harvard Doomed?,” June 11, 2025

It’s commonly called Cancel Culture.

Featured image: Balancing A Male And A Female Worker In The Cloud/leowolfert, Adobe Stock

Recently, Nature’s editors announced a new policy of transparent peer review for their leading science journal:

It means that, over time, more Nature papers will include a peer-review file. The identity of the reviewers will remain anonymous, unless they choose otherwise — as happens now. But the exchanges between the referees and the authors will be accessible to all. Our aim in doing so is to open up what many see as the ‘black box’ of science, shedding light on how a research paper is made. This serves to increase transparency and (we hope) to build trust in the scientific process.

“Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers,” June 16, 2025

This probably won’t stop Cancel Culture. But, with everything public — except names, which will be, in many cases, easy to guess — it will force those who are attempting to subvert honest enquiry to adopt much more doublespeak to hide their intentions than they used to need. And they may often fail. Hope for the best.