Yeah, but at the end you can still fabricate the data, remove "outliers",... Plus it's almost impossible to imagine a world where, before any experiment in any field, you predeclare it.
Not that education can fix all these (you can't prevent evil), but if reviewers and journals and conferences started to accept more the negative results, the incentive in lying would quickly decrease. And people would probably start to "disprove" interesting theories, instead of trying to "prove" niche results...
>Yeah, but at the end you can still fabricate the data, remove "outliers",...
Fabricating data is essentially fraud. And while it does happen, most of the problems with reproducibility are not problems of fraud.
It won't protect against outliers, but removing outliers will not solve most problems. It'll happen, but again, I don't think the majority of irreproducible studies are due to misuse of outliers.
>Plus it's almost impossible to imagine a world where, before any experiment in any field, you predeclare it.
Not at all. I'm not saying you predeclare every experiment - just every experiment you try to publish.
The way it works is:
1. You make observations (i.e. collect data - no predeclaring anything). If you see interesting patterns, you'll form a hypothesis.
2. This is the stage where you predeclare your hypothesis, and the criterion of falsification.
3. You now collect new data and test it against your hypothesis.
The hard part is ensuring people won't use some of the old data and claim they collected after their declaration. It's a hard problem, but not an impossible one.
People are in the habit these days of collecting a lot of data, seeing patterns, and publishing them. That's really not how a lot of early science was done. Once you see the patterns, you need to conduct more experiments to falsify them.
Not that education can fix all these (you can't prevent evil), but if reviewers and journals and conferences started to accept more the negative results, the incentive in lying would quickly decrease. And people would probably start to "disprove" interesting theories, instead of trying to "prove" niche results...