Last week, I wrote about a scientific paper that was published in the elite journal Nature in 1995. Within a couple of years, the findings of said paper were called into question by several other papers in different journals. As of today, nearly two decades since the original came out, nobody has replicated it. And yet, it’s still sitting there in the literature, still influencing others. It’s been cited nearly 1,000 times.

Some readers were angry with my post, arguing, for example, that “science’s self-correcting paradigm works over decades”. Indeed, that was my point. Science’s self-correction is generally very slow — perhaps, as many argue, too slow.

This week I learned about an unfolding scientific debate that’s got