I read a lot of papers on behavioural economics and psychological decision making experiments for university, like dunning-kruger, kahneman, etc and in my opinion the first autocorrelation article reads like a rebuttal paper but more informal, the approach is scientific even if it may be flawed. This is how knowledge advances. I disagree that it is anti-science. Challenging accepted postulations is good. Even famous professors make mistakes, I don't blame the writer for making an honest mistake. That's how we got this new piece of writing

Behavioural science is a pretty new field, its pretty easy to get abberant results or manipulate the results to show 'something' statistically. Many findings in earlier papers could not be replicated, or had applied statistics incorrectly, or showed different results when research participants were not white college kids.

This is a whole other problem within academia, the pressure to publish something even when there is nothing and perceived legitimacy based on the number of citations a paper has. My professor always said don't look at the number of citations, understand the method and the rebuttal, there were numerous low citation but solid papers showing flaws in famous ones but everyone who isn't deep into the subject holds the original assertion to be legitimate because its "famous"