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Well that depends. What kind of reproducibility are you talking about? If we talk about something like Higgs then it was definitely reproduced. Same with gravitational waves.

But the other problem is that the soft sciences have a compounding problem. The one I mentioned about the foundation not being as strong. As a comparison psychology needs a p=0.05 to publish. Particle physicists need 0.003 for evidence and 0.0000003 for "discovery". But the big difference is the later are working off of mathematical models that predict behaviours and you are comparing to these. You are operating in completely different search spaces. The math of the hard sciences allows you to reduce this search space substantially while the soft sciences still don't have this advantage. But give them time and they'll get to it. The math is difficult. Which really makes them hard to compare. They have different ways of doing things.




The huge huge huge majority of published papers aren't CERN-style monumental efforts with bazillions of repeated experiments that you can use to get insanely good stats on.

From my own experience in my PhD I've seen outrageous replication problems in CS, microbiology, neurology, mechanical engineering, and even physics on the "hard sciences" side of things. I've seen replication problems also in psychology, sociology, and political science on the "soft sciences" side of things.

People who come from a "hard science" background seem to have this belief that it is way more rigorous than other fields. I disagree. If anything, the soft sciences are actually making a movement to address the problem even if that means more articles being published saying that 40% of psych papers are not reproducible or whatever.


This. I have seen some appalling stuff come out of the hard sciences.




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