My colleagues and I are finding it difficult to replicate results from several well-received AI safety papers. Last week, I was working with a paper that has over 100 karma on LessWrong and discovered it is mostly false but gives nice-looking statistics only because of a very specific evaluation setup. Some other papers have even worse issues.

I know that this is a well-known problem that exists in other fields as well, but I can’t help but be extremely annoyed. The most frustrating part is that this problem should be solvable. If a junior-level person can spend 10-25 hours working with a paper and confirm how solid the results are, why don’t we fund people to actually just do that? 

For ~200k a year, a small team of early career people could replicate/confirm the results of the healthy majority of important safety papers. I’m tempted to start an org/team to do this. Is there something I’m missing?

EDIT: I originally said "over 100 upvotes" but changed it to "over 100 karma." Thank you to @habryka for flagging that this was confusing.