SCIENCE: “How do you get so many highly-cited papers speaking so confidently about every little sub-sub-detail of a phenomenon, if the phenomenon never existed in the first place?” Plus: “We know many scientific studies are false. But we usually find this out one-at-a-time. This – again, assuming the new study is true, which it might not be – is a massacre. It offers an unusually good chance for reflection.”

Science is a process, not an event, and being wrong about things is part of the process. And over-enthusiasm is part of being human, and scientists are human. But the desire to turn research into immediate recommendations on how people should live, while also human, isn’t the least bit scientific.

And the replication crisis is a real thing:

But the reason I feel compelled to dabble in this subject anyway is that I don’t feel like anyone else is conveying the level of absolute terror we should be feeling right now. As far as I can tell, this is the most troubling outbreak of the replication crisis so far. And it didn’t happen in a field like social psychology which everyone already knows is kind of iffy. It happened in neuroscience, with dramatic knock-on effects on medicine, psychology, and psychiatry.

I feel like every couple of months we get a result that could best be summed up as “no matter how bad you thought things were, they’re actually worse”. And then things turn out to be even worse than that. We can’t just become 100% certain things are arbitrarily bad – that would be making the same mistake as the neuroscientists who were overly eager to reject the no-neurogenesis dogma. But that means we always have to be ready for disappointment.

Troubling.