8a) See Post 051721_1a

8a1) Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management.
    Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing "replication crisis" in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don't hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments.
    The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.
    "We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated," write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. "Given this prediction, we ask 'why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?'"

[...]

The influence of an inaccurate paper published in a prestigious journal can have repercussions for decades. For example, the study Andrew Wakefield published in The Lancet in 1998 turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine because of an implied link between vaccinations and autism. The incorrect findings were retracted by The Lancet 12 years later, but the claims that autism is linked to vaccines continue.

    The authors added that journals may feel pressure to publish interesting findings, and so do academics. For example, in promotion decisions, most academic institutions use citations as an important metric in the decision of whether to promote a faculty member.

A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more at Phys.org

8a2) Of interest is the memetic survival rate based on fitness. According to this study, the fitness of the meme is determined not by truth–as represented by replicability, but by different, and arguably non-scientific factors such as novelty, narrativization, media coverage, and the public's willingness to engage with the data offered. 

We might ask, what is the memetic fitness of this study?

1a) Neoplatonism and the role of logos as perpetually eternal and infallible

1a1) Why do we assume that text is somehow fathomable and/or absolute in meaning? How do we propose to read the mind of the writer in their own spacetime? Do I know my own mind past the point of writing or typing a thought? On (re)reading and editing, do I not begin to narrativize from memory? The falsifiability of the empirical hypothesis can heuristically curb the outright falsehoods, but what about that frontier between noumena and phenomena?

1a2) Neo-platonism (or Neoplatonism) is a modern term used to designate the period of Platonic philosophy beginning with the work of Plotinus and ending with the closing of the Platonic Academy by the Emperor Justinian in 529 C.E. This brand of Platonism, which is often described as ‘mystical’ or religious in nature, developed outside the mainstream of Academic Platonism.

Neo-Platonism at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 

1a3) Gnosticism (after gnôsis, the Greek word for “knowledge” or “insight”) is the name given to a loosely organized religious and philosophical movement that flourished in the first and second centuries CE. The exact origin(s) of this school of thought cannot be traced, although it is possible to locate influences or sources as far back as the second and first centuries BCE, such as the early treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Jewish Apocalyptic writings, and especially Platonic philosophy and the Hebrew Scriptures themselves.

Gnosticism at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

1a4) Language is a virus at Wikipedia

1a5) “Throughout our history,” Leto said, “the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: “This is what it meant.”

Frank Herbert – God Emperor of Dune