Replication Crisis - and now INFERENCE CRISIS

[TomBAvoider]

Scientists have been sounding the replication crisis alarm for quite a while. While not much seems to have been done to correct for that, we can now focus on a brand new crisis - the INFERENCE CRISIS. Frankly, it doesn't seem particularly surprising - perhaps the only surprising thing is that it took so long to formally study this issue - after all, everyone has had this takeaway more than once "how on earth does this 'conclusion' follow from this study?!". I know I have this reaction almost daily. But how to quantify this? Well, here it is, and it's even worse than we might have suspected:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191010161540.htm

"For the past decade, social scientists have been unpacking a 'replication crisis' that has revealed how findings of an alarming number of scientific studies are difficult or impossible to repeat. Efforts are underway to improve the reliability of findings, but cognitive psychology researchers say that not enough attention has been paid to the validity of theoretical inferences made from research findings.

"Rotello reports that about one-third of responders "seemed to be doing OK," one-third did a bit better than pure guessing, and one-third "made misleading conclusions." She adds, "Our jaws dropped when we saw that. How is it that researchers who have used these tools for years could come to completely different conclusions about what's going on?""