> by that logic, every important result looks suspicious before it replicates

Every important result should look suspicious before replication. This is the rational way to interpret early research.

You should not allow your mental probability distribution to be anchored around the first claim you see that is proposed as a paper. In the modern publishing environment, a heuristic of assuming singular results will not replicate would be accurate more often than assuming they’re true.

This isn’t intuitively obvious until you’ve read a lot of papers. It’s unfortunate but true.

Even some of the widely accepted findings like the benefits of fish oil supplementation are having a hard time replicating in large scale studies. Go back 10 years and it was almost universally accepted that those early fish oil studies must be true.