I am happy to have seen Ioannidis' talk on this very matter a while ago - very inspiring indeed.
However, I think, often such articles as the one in The Economist lead "outsiders" to the opinion that much of the current biomedical science is flawed. They say that "only" 10 out of 13 in the article have been shown to be reproducible, and while even three bad teeth are not good, it is not even clear what was wrong in the remaining three. It might be very trivial issues, or it might be fraud, who knows. Furthermore, it does mean that at least 3/4 of those papers were fine. Last, so far, the reproducibility results of the 50 cancer papers is still outstanding.
So while I do agree there is an issue at hand, it is a bit like with Apple vs. Windows issues: consumers of the former brand are used to high quality, so a single bug or issue in an Apple soft- or hardware quickly fills news outlets in the world, while nobody gives a damn about even the most critical issues in Windows, because their customers are used to it. While it is important to correct the (ab-)use of biomedical statistics, I think the way this is being presented to outsiders tends a bit towards sensationalism.
I do agree with Ioannidis' as far as that our papers should get more in-depth reviews (not only) of the statistics in them, but the problem is that we need to publish 2-3 papers per year that in turn need 3-5 reviewers per paper, so everybody has to do about 10-15 reviews per year. And by "doing a review" I do not mean just doing an "intensive" reading of the paper being reviewed in half a day, but actually looking at the data and methods and spending some days on it. I am not sure we have the time for that and I believe the reason is this madness of having to publish several papers per year just to survive. I.e., the real problem is our "publish or perish" system, nothing else. All this leads to the fact that it can be better to have dozens of junk papers than one good one, at least if you do not manage to get it to the very top (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.).
However, I think, often such articles as the one in The Economist lead "outsiders" to the opinion that much of the current biomedical science is flawed. They say that "only" 10 out of 13 in the article have been shown to be reproducible, and while even three bad teeth are not good, it is not even clear what was wrong in the remaining three. It might be very trivial issues, or it might be fraud, who knows. Furthermore, it does mean that at least 3/4 of those papers were fine. Last, so far, the reproducibility results of the 50 cancer papers is still outstanding.
So while I do agree there is an issue at hand, it is a bit like with Apple vs. Windows issues: consumers of the former brand are used to high quality, so a single bug or issue in an Apple soft- or hardware quickly fills news outlets in the world, while nobody gives a damn about even the most critical issues in Windows, because their customers are used to it. While it is important to correct the (ab-)use of biomedical statistics, I think the way this is being presented to outsiders tends a bit towards sensationalism.
I do agree with Ioannidis' as far as that our papers should get more in-depth reviews (not only) of the statistics in them, but the problem is that we need to publish 2-3 papers per year that in turn need 3-5 reviewers per paper, so everybody has to do about 10-15 reviews per year. And by "doing a review" I do not mean just doing an "intensive" reading of the paper being reviewed in half a day, but actually looking at the data and methods and spending some days on it. I am not sure we have the time for that and I believe the reason is this madness of having to publish several papers per year just to survive. I.e., the real problem is our "publish or perish" system, nothing else. All this leads to the fact that it can be better to have dozens of junk papers than one good one, at least if you do not manage to get it to the very top (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.).