This is evidence of science working, and self correcting.

Should we expect everything that gets published to be definitive, the end word, worthy of enshrining on marble and being unerring in perpetuity?

Of course not. There is no more unscientific view of knowledge and of science.

Journal articles are the communications between practitioners. Blog posts before there were blog posts. Sometimes they are revolutionary. Sometimes they are work-a-day, filling in essential knowledge but not revolutionary. Many are arduous journeys that are hated by all by that touch the manuscripts by the time they get through the process of writing and peer review. Some are wrong.

The scientific literature is not a series of proofs and lemmas, it's an accumulation of evidence paired with contemporaneous interpretation of what that data might mean, and those interpretations should be viewed as fluid.

The data should be forever (unless there is error or fraud). The interpretation is moving.

I don't agree that need we tons more "rigor" in science, instead it would be better to have clearer communication along with less busy work.

Reminds me of a conversation with a late friend. We wondered: what would the most academic book possible look like?

It could have: one brief, vague, and hedged statement, supported by a crapton of superscript references -- which constitute the rest of the book.

So like:

"Chapter 1:

Some things about the universe are at least partly knowable.<references 1-100,000>

The End."

Maybe there is a vast dark matter of uncompromising super rigorous science happening that is invisible to us because it is too rigorous to meet its own standard so never publishes anything. But they know things.

Behavioral science is too hard to get right. The effect sizes mostly don't seem to be big and it's too hard to run a trial, so to keep a career going scientists are forced to aim for some sexy outcome which isn't there from an underpowered experiment. But almost nothing really matters in that field. It's as good as plastic recycling.

Still, we are forced to study it because there are interventions that have worked in the past: cigarette smoking, teen pregnancies, etc.

And it's useful to know what made those so successful. But maybe the answer is luck.

Very misleading choice of artwork showing natural scientists in doubt when it's actually things like behavioral theorists who have orders of magnitude more irreproducible results.

This reminds me of how the Dunning Kreguer results might have been misapplied statistics.

I can imagine a world where they hedged the outcome sufficiently to not have to retract. "methodologies based on those used here may prove beneficial based on preliminary findings, subject to further refinement" type comment.

I mean, without over-egging it you would not deploy peer review, based on the modern evidenced outcomes: the papers are demonstrably not better in volume, and have to be retracted, and peer-review has been massively destructive of career progression for academics because of Rei-ification. To me, it's analogous: the model is flawed? refine the model don't junk the principle.

I think at one remove I agree with comments which go to "this is evidence that rigor is good, and self-policing is good"

And a prominent study on dishonesty was itself found to have fabricated data [1].

Like too much refined sugar, this is too much refined irony. What is going on?

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/08/gino-ari...