The Decay of Professional Science
An excerpt from HARDCODED
This excerpt from one of my two forthcoming books might help you understand why I am so unconcerned about the dismissals that the SSH is not scientific, as well as why I am confident that the taxonomy will hold up and prove useful over time.
How long does it take for a scientific field to fill with garbage?
The question sounds polemical, but it has a precise mathematical answer. Given a field’s publication rate, its replication rate, its correction mechanisms, and—critically—its citation dynamics, we can model the accumulation of unreliable findings over time. The result is not encouraging.
The key insight comes from a 2021 study by Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy published in Science Advances. They examined papers from three major replication projects—in psychology, economics, and general science journals including Nature and Science—and correlated replicability with citation counts. Their finding was striking: papers that failed to replicate were cited significantly more than papers that replicated successfully.
Not slightly more. Sixteen times more per year, on average.
In Nature and Science, the gap was even larger: non-replicable papers were cited 300 times more than replicable ones. And the citation advantage persisted even after the replication failure was published.
Only 12% of post-replication citations acknowledged that the original finding had failed to replicate.
The other 88% cited the discredited paper as if it were still valid.
The Serra-Garcia and Gneezy finding transforms the replication crisis from a problem of individual bad actors into a problem of system dynamics. It’s not just that bad papers get published. It’s that bad papers get amplified. They accumulate citations. They enter textbooks. They shape the training of the next generation of researchers. They become, in effect, the curriculum.
Let me build the model: p(t+1) ≈ (p(t) × α) / (p(t) × α + (1 - p(t)))
Where does each major scientific discipline stand on the decay curve as of late 2025? Using the model’s framework—starting unreliability rate, citation amplification factor, correction rate, and years since amplification dynamics took hold—we can estimate current garbage percentages and project time to total collapse.
Social Psychology
Starting unreliability (1975): ~20% Citation amplification
(α): ~16-20 (high; “surprising” findings dominate)
Correction rate (C): ~0.01 (virtually nonexistent)
Years in decay: ~50
Current estimated garbage rate: 85-90%
The Open Science Collaboration’s 36% replication rate in 2015 (for 2008 papers) suggests the field was already at 64% unreliable seventeen years ago. The decay has continued. Social priming, ego depletion, power posing, stereotype threat, growth mindset—the field’s greatest hits have fallen one by one. What remains is a literature where the safest assumption about any individual finding is that it is false.
Projected 100% collapse: Already effectively complete. The field produces occasional valid findings, but they are indistinguishable from the noise without independent replication. The literature is no longer a reliable guide to human social behavior.
Calling yourself a scientist in 100 years will probably have the same ring to it as calling yourself a witch doctor today.
At least us engineers have a mechanism in place that gets rid of the fraud. Bridges fall down, factories blow up and phones stop working ( ok the last one is due to Indians ).
Physics has wasted 40 years on string theory, producing a mass of papers too numerous to count. Hard to top that.
Cosmology has blown a full century based on the ridiculous notion that stars are balls of plasma. They aren't; they're composed of hydrogen in a lattice.