It has been called “galling” and “worse than we thought.” It risks demolishing the technocratic case for “expertise.” Nearly two decades into science’s replication crisis, have scholars, researchers, and funding agencies learned anything? Like a plumbing nuisance-turned-emergency, the replication crisis emerged in dribs and drabs before gushing violently into the public’s consciousness. As early as the 1950s, Democratic Sen. Estes Kefauver was holding congressional hearings on “the sorry state of science supporting drug effectiveness,” a critique that led to stricter FDA requirements. The year 1977 saw the publication of Michael J. Mahoney’s landmark study exposing confirmation bias in the peer-review process. (“Reviewers were strongly biased against manuscripts which reported results contrary to their theoretical perspective.”) Yet, despite these early warnings, the true clarion call was sounded in 2005 with the appearance of John P. A. Ioannidis’s “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” A shock treatise that has since approached 3 million views on PLOS Medicine’s open-access website, the physician-scientist’s paper argued that “in modern [epidemiological] research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.” Ioannidis and others had begun to notice that a number of famous and influential experiments could not be rerun with similar results. The consequence, as the PLOS Medicine paper tersely declared, was a scientific establishment rife with “confusion and disappointment.” Though Ioannidis was ostensibly writing for an audience of specialists, evidence of an...