At my first reading, I agreed with Alone's interpretation in 'The decline effect is stupid'. The article seems to describe anti-science, spooky, the-world-is-"connected"-and-affected-by-our-perception metaphysics.

For example, this doesn't sound like it wants to describe publication bias:

It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

And certainly not this:

The next year, the size of the effect shrank another thirty per cent. When other labs repeated Schooler’s experiments, they got a similar spread of data, with a distinct downward trend. “This was profoundly frustrating,” he says. “It was as if nature gave me this great result and then tried to take it back.” In private, Schooler began referring to the problem as “cosmic habituation,” by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli.

[Consider, what work is "cosmic" doing in the last sentence?]

The article nods at scientific explanations, but then says they're not sufficient to explain what's going on. What is the article trying to imply? That something can be true at first, for a while, and then the truth value wears off? Because the scientist was getting too successful, the people were too confidant, the cosmos was feeling weary of being consistent? This idea tugs familiar grooves -- it's the superstition we're all programmed with.

But the article is somewhat long, and as I meander through, I consider that perhaps it intends that there should be a scientific explanation for "the effect" after all. Maybe the language and supernatural insinuations within the article are playfully meant as bait to goad scientists into thinking about it and dissolving it. (If it reflects a "real" trend, what is the scientific explanation then?).

I appreciate other things that Dr. Lehrer has written -- he seems to have a scientific worldview through and through -- so this latter interpretation is the one I finally settle on.