But perhaps it is not as big a shame for them as some think it should be...
They were just putting it off.
People are surprisingly thoughtless.
Yoga, breathing exercises, meditation and the like were once considered fads and derided by your ‘science’.
What do you mean "once"?
It is "ass covering" all the way. Not "does it work" all the way...
? This was a human subject study, that would cost $$ and there would be very little upside to confirmation and only a little notoriety with a failure to replicate (which by the way is not dispositive, people might need multiple failed replications to know who to believe, depending on the size of the replication). Maybe you didn't read the post: this was data fraud discovered by statistical irregularities. That is indeed becoming easy to spot with more widespread statistical literacy, at least for unsophisticated jobs like this from decades ago.
Sure. Pay them to do it.
Before that, cold fusion.
We still have the ion drive that doesn't require fuel. I don't think it has ever been successfully replicated, but I think that it also hasn't been successfully repudiated, either.
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. I suspect that not all of it is deliberate fraud, but rather, people wanting their preconceived bias to be satisfied.
Both of them are useful as is.
Replicating a social experiment, when successful, don't give you anything new.
Physics solved this quite some time ago.
This is a constant tug of war..