If we are aiming for quality, then being wrong absolutely should be. I would argue that is how it works in real life anyway. What we quibble over is what is the appropriate cutoff.

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rtkwe 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There's a big gulf between being wrong because you or a collaborator missed an uncontrolled confounding factor and falsifying or altering results. Science accepts that people sometimes make mistakes in their work because a) they can also be expected to miss something eventually and b) a lot of work is done by people in training in labs you're not directly in control of (collaborators). They already aim for quality and if you're consistently shown to be sloppy or incorrect when people try to use your work in their own.

The final bit is a thing I think most people miss when they think about replication. A lot of papers don't get replicated directly but their measurements do when other researchers try to use that data to perform their own experiments, at least in the more physical sciences this gets tougher the more human centric the research is. You can't fake or be wrong for long when you're writing papers about the properties of compounds and molecules. Someone is going to come try to base some new idea off your data and find out you're wrong when their experiment doesn't work. (or spend months trying to figure out what's wrong and finally double check the original data).

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wizzwizz4 an hour ago | parent [-]

In fields like psychology, though, you can be wrong for decades. If your result is foundational enough, and other people have "replicated" it, then most researchers will toss out contradictory evidence as "guess those people were an unrepresentative sample". This can be extremely harmful when, for instance, the prevailing view is "this demographic are just perverts" or "most humans are selfish thieves at heart, held back by perceived social consensus" – both examples where researcher misconduct elevated baseless speculation to the position of "prevailing understanding", which led to bad policy, which had devastating impacts on people's lives.

(People are better about this in psychology, now: schoolchildren are taught about some of the more egregious cases, even before university, and individual researchers are much more willing to take a sceptical view of certain suspect classes of "prevailing understanding". The fact that even I, a non-psychologist, know about this, is good news. But what of the fields whose practitioners don't know they have this problem?)

	▲	rtkwe an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah like I said the soft validation by subsequent papers is more true in more baseline physical sciences because it involves fewer uncontrollable variables. That's why I mentioned 'hard' sciences in my post, messy humans are messy and make science waaay harder.