It isn't even clear to me what it would mean to have a theoretical solution of the file drawer problem given that it is a problem about how culture, and a type of problem exists in any field.
The file drawer problem is about an effect. If you can estimate exactly how large the effect is when you look at the question of whether to take a certain drug you solve the problem because you can just run the numbers.
On the contrary. We have ways of handling the file drawer problem, and they aren't theory based issues. Pre-registration of studies works.
The concept of the file drawer problem first appeared in 1976 if I can trust google ngrams.
How much money do you think it cost to run the experiments to come up with the concept of the file drawer problem and the concept pre-registration of studies? I don't think that's knowledge that got created by running expensive experiments. It came from people engaging in theoretical thinking.
It makes about as much sense to talk about how having better theory could somehow solve type I errors.
Type I errors are a feature of frequentist statistics. If you don't use null hypotheses you don't make type I errors. Bayesians don't make type I errors because they don't have null hypotheses.
How much money do you think it cost to run the experiments to come up with the concept of the file drawer problem and the concept pre-registration of studies? I don't think that's knowledge that got created by running expensive experiments. It came from people engaging in theoretical thinking.
The earliest citation in the Rosenthal paper that coined the term 'file drawer' is to a 1959 paper by one Theodore Sterling; I jailbroke this to "Publication Decisions and Their Possible Effects on Inferences Drawn from tests of Significance - or Vice Versa&qu...
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)