The Decay Function of Professional Science - Vox Popoli

 An excerpt from HARDCODED: AI and The End of the Scientific Consensus:

How long does it take for a scientific field to fill with garbage?

The question sounds polemical, but it has a precise mathematical answer. Given a field’s publication rate, its replication rate, its correction mechanisms, and—critically—its citation dynamics, we can model the accumulation of unreliable findings over time. The result is not encouraging.

The key insight comes from a 2021 study by Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy published in Science Advances. They examined papers from three major replication projects—in psychology, economics, and general science journals including Nature and Science—and correlated replicability with citation counts. Their finding was striking: papers that failed to replicate were cited significantly more than papers that replicated successfully.

Not slightly more. Sixteen times more per year, on average......

https://voxday.net/2026/05/02/the-decay-function-of-professional-science/ 

.....When half the literature is unreliable, 94 percent of the citation-weighted training signal comes from unreliable papers.

This is the amplification mechanism. The literature can be 50 percent garbage, but the effective literatur, what researchers actually encounter, learn from, and calibrate against, is 94 percent garbage. The citation dynamics concentrate the garbage.

Now what happens when researchers trained on this signal produce new work?