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I'm sorry, but this is such a ridiculous counter argument I'm speechless.

An explanation point as criticism?

How dare he wear tweed, his argument is invalid.
The replication study isn't magically more accurate than the original study. If the original paper finds an 0.5 standard deviation effect and the replication study finds an 0.2 standard deviation effect, that increases our confidence that a real effect was measured

It also increased our confidence that the effect is small enough to be ignored. You can't pretend that the two studies are independent from each other. The second is directly the result of the first and you need to use Bayesian methods to calculate your belief of the result. The questions of 'is there an effect' and 'the effect size is >= 0.5 sd' give you two vastly different probabilities and vastly different policy responses.

An explanation point as criticism

As in "eats, shoots, and leaves", a little punctuation can totally change the meaning of a sentence. In this case, a period would have expressed agreement while an exclamation point expresses incredulity.

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