Granted, my knowledge is limited to physics and chemistry, which I know are small potatoes compared to the life sciences.
With that said, a problem with replication is that a given lab tends to gear itself up for one or a small number of research programs that could span years or decades. Experimental apparatus are developed, knowledge and techniques are passed from one student to the next, and so forth.
My thesis project involved more than a quarter million dollars worth of commercial gear, plus a lot of stuff that I built. By the time I was finished, some of my tools were already obsolete.
If one lab publishes a result, another lab would have to gear itself up to replicate that result, which would probably include a capital investment plus a lot of time spent making beginner mistakes.
I don't believe strict replication is necessarily the best or only way to advance science. It produces reliable factoids, but they are still factoids. Physics has made its greatest strides when experimental evidence, that may be riddled with mistakes, supports the development of unifying theories of ever increasing power and accuracy.
Preferable to strict replication might be to let researchers study overlapping domains, so that several projects attack the same problem, but possibly from different angles.
Those who do the replication are also very unlikely to get published, both in success and failure.
My impression is that replication efforts often happen when one group tries to build on another group's work and they get frustrated enough to retry the original assumptions.
That's a problem of the current system we have, not a fundamental issue like the one he's portraying. It's one of the problems we need to solve if we want science to be better.
With that said, a problem with replication is that a given lab tends to gear itself up for one or a small number of research programs that could span years or decades. Experimental apparatus are developed, knowledge and techniques are passed from one student to the next, and so forth.
My thesis project involved more than a quarter million dollars worth of commercial gear, plus a lot of stuff that I built. By the time I was finished, some of my tools were already obsolete.
If one lab publishes a result, another lab would have to gear itself up to replicate that result, which would probably include a capital investment plus a lot of time spent making beginner mistakes.
I don't believe strict replication is necessarily the best or only way to advance science. It produces reliable factoids, but they are still factoids. Physics has made its greatest strides when experimental evidence, that may be riddled with mistakes, supports the development of unifying theories of ever increasing power and accuracy.
Preferable to strict replication might be to let researchers study overlapping domains, so that several projects attack the same problem, but possibly from different angles.