It does undermine the narrative. Eventually nobody will trust any public sector funded science. Private companies will still invest in scientific R&D to enhance their products but, like today, they won't talk about it much and they won't publish papers, only patents. That's where we're heading.
First problem: the sort of people who popularized Follow The Science™ actually meant "follow the people who run public sector institutions". Not "follow single studies" or anything that deep. The catchphrase was deployed many times during COVID to browbeat people into obeying people like Anthony Fauci, a man notorious for claiming he literally was science. "Attacks on me are attacks on science", he said. It was pure authoritarianism dressed up as intellectualism, as was so often the case throughout history (see: Lysenko).
Second problem: the heuristic that you should only trust a claim if it appears in several papers will also lead to you trusting many bogus claims. Academics regularly cite work they haven't even read, let alone replicated. It's easy to find invalid citations in the literature. Most of them just take claims on trust or even cite claims clearly advertised as made up fiction (sorry, "modeling assumptions").
Third problem: many results that replicate shouldn't:
First problem: the sort of people who popularized Follow The Science™ actually meant "follow the people who run public sector institutions". Not "follow single studies" or anything that deep. The catchphrase was deployed many times during COVID to browbeat people into obeying people like Anthony Fauci, a man notorious for claiming he literally was science. "Attacks on me are attacks on science", he said. It was pure authoritarianism dressed up as intellectualism, as was so often the case throughout history (see: Lysenko).
Second problem: the heuristic that you should only trust a claim if it appears in several papers will also lead to you trusting many bogus claims. Academics regularly cite work they haven't even read, let alone replicated. It's easy to find invalid citations in the literature. Most of them just take claims on trust or even cite claims clearly advertised as made up fiction (sorry, "modeling assumptions").
Third problem: many results that replicate shouldn't:
https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...