Isn't that a point, it is research fraud so attempting then failing to replicate the results which shows the original result is flawed is why there is a replication crisis.
I just mulled this over a bit in my head and... maybe we can actually approach this slightly differently and (hopefully) more efficiently.
The point with PACE specifically was that it was a trial designed in a way that can never answer any relevant question right from the outset. I would argue that you do not even need scientific literacy to see that, basic literacy should be enough - nobody knows what their 'specialist medical care' actually was, it is very difficult to ascertain what exactly their GET/CBT entailed (yeah sure, whoever undertook it will tell you what they think they did, but a problem with psychological interventions in general is that you can't exactly give someone 10mg of a racemic mixture twice a day), they dropped objective outcome measures, more or less redefined words like 'recovery' and so on. You probably do need scientific literacy to understand problems with recruiting patients, samples and effect sizes, statistical stuff etc and I can see how the real world may make it a bit hard to construct ideal trials in medicine - e.g. people with severe ME can't go to the doctor so it will be harder to do trials on them that get ethical approval - but you actually have to be a bit of a moron to read through the entire thing and genuinely come to the conclusions that the people working there reported.
This does not even need to be replicated to be seen as failure because it is a structural garbage in / garbage out problem. Whatever random stuff comes out the other end once you run the same things through the same garbled mess is meaningless. We need peer reviewers at the very least, but better yet grant committees (or whoever greenlights this stuff) to be able to spot research that is not designed in a way which would add knowledge. If it really is 'impossible' due to real world constraints to stop this shit entirely - like people who want easy doctorates by declaring random epidemics mass hysteria - we at least need a system to call it out as soon as it is spotted more effectively than what we have now. I have explained those trials which were the basis for many of us not getting help to 3 different people who worked in research and all of them were baffled and responded with their polite way of saying 'wtf is this shit, no one will listen to this, I don't think I even know anyone who is stupid enough to pay much attention' - yet here we are, still talking about it almost a decade later.
There is this concept in real science where 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. Many people who are into psychology seem to just accept things that are very extraordinary to me. Just take the entire concept of psychosomatic explanations: Claiming that emotional stress can lead to weight gain because it is observed that some people eat more when stressed (for whatever reason) sort of makes sense and is not, at this point, very extraordinary - we know how calories work. Claiming that a female human getting a nosebleed stems from her longing for a man because it is observed that women sometimes get nosebleeds and also the observer is coked out of his mind at the time he connects the dots does seem pretty extraordinary to me. Yet the field of psychology as a whole seems to gloss over this concept a bit more readily than it maybe should.
