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Notes -
The replication crisis (e.g., in psychology) is very good for the field and for humanity: it more accurately reflects the true state of the field, compared to what we thought. The theory of replication is why psychology bills itself a science; the root problem was that replication wasn't done in practice. If every new result required two replications before being tentatively accepted as possibly describing something real, then psychology wouldn't have a replication crisis, it would just have replication, as a science should.
(On the contrary, beware any field that claims the status of science and either doesn't have the practice of replication baked in, or isn't having a replication crisis. I am looking at you, Sociology. Away to the humanities with you.)
The statistic to I like to keep in mind is: 6%. That's the proportion of all proposed medical treatments that start the FDA stage-I trials that successfully make it past stage-III to FDA approval. It takes serious financial backing to start stage-I (which is when one tests the treatment on a handful of healthy adults to check for adverse effects), so only the most promising treatments that have solid theory for why they should work, and which have been extensively tested in the lab and (if appropriate) on animals, even start the FDA medical approval process.
So I recon that the strongest academic theories in psychology are maybe epistemologically on par with the pre-FDA-stage-I medical theories. If someone were to actually put serious money in backing as rigorous a test for an application of such a theory as the one required by the FDA, then I expect that only 6% would make it.
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