Less than half of peer-reviewed, published experiments in psychology can be replicated with the same or similar effects[1]. The reproducibility of published biomedical research is even lower, and the cost of irreproducibility in biomedicine has been estimated at $28 billion per year, in the US alone[2]. This is all widely considered undesirable—but how reproducible should science be? This talk is a thinly veiled plea for philosophical help with this question.

[1] Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4716
[2] Freedman, L. P., Cockburn, I. M. & Simcoe, T. S. (2015). The economics of reproducibility in preclinical research. PLoS Biology,13. e1002165.