I'd argue you do have <100% reliability in Factorio, and much of the game is in increasing the 9s.
Biters can wreck havok on your base. Miners contaminate your belts with the wrong types of ore, if you weren't paying enough attention near overlapping fields. Misplaced inserters may mis-feed your assemblers, reducing efficiency or leaving outright nonfunctional buildings. Misclicks can cripple large swaths of your previously working factory, ruining plenty of speedruns if they go uncaught. For later game megabase situations, you must deal with limited lifetimes as mining locations dry up, requiring you to overhaul existing systems with new routes of resources into them. As inputs are split and redirected, existing manufacturing can choke and sputter when they end up starved of resources. Letting your power plants starve of fuel can result in a small crisis! Electric miners mining coal, refineries turning oil into solid fuel, electric inserters fueling the boilers, water pumps providing the water to said boilers - these things all take power, and jump starting these after a power outage takes time you might not have if under active attack if your laser turrets are all offline as well.
But you have means of remediating much of this unreliability. Emergency fuel and water stockpiles, configuring priorities such that fuel for power is prioritized ahead of your fancy new iron smelting setup, programmable alerts for when input stockpiles run low, ammo-turrets that work without power, burner inserters for your power production's critical path will bootstrap themselves after an outage, roboports that replace biter-attacked defenses.
Your first smelting setup in Factorio will likely be a hand-fed burner miner and furnace, taking at most 50 coal. This will run out of power in minutes. Then you might use inserters to add a coal buffer. Then a belt of coal, so you don't need to constantly refill the coal buffer. Then a rail station, so you don't need to constantly hand-route entirely new coal and ore mining patches. Then you'll use blueprints and bots to automate much of constructing your new inputs. If you're really crazy, you'll experiment with automating the usage of those blueprints to build self-expanding bases...
The point is, it would be significantly more complex if things frequently failed even when "operating properly". And this happened at all levels of abstraction in a factory.
My printer might jam if I feed paper crooked or poorly. My assemblers might jam if I feed incorrect components through misclicks, misplaced miners, or filled outputs.
My printer might fail from the entropy of wear and tear. My assemblers might fail from the entropy of biters attracted by generated pollution.
My printer might stall from running out of paper or a filled output tray. My assemblers might stall from running out of inputs or a filled output belt or chest.
Why is the printer arguably unreliable, but the assembler "100% reliable"?
Failures of my printer are not caused by magic faries sprinkling dice rolling pixie dust on my toner cartrige. Failures have physical causes. That factorio's assembler failures have modeled causes as well, instead of an arbitrary and magic dice roll, does not detract from those failure modes being reliability issues.
That my printer fails far less frequently than my Factorio assemblers points to my printer being more reliable than my Factorio assemblers. Your point that reliability could be even worse misses my point, which is merely that not only does Factorio already avoid the fiction of "100%" or "perfect reliability" - but that perhaps Factorio already models reliability worse than "real-life" in some aspects already.
I don't think it would be particularly bad for inserters inserting at slightly different speeds from each other, or occasionally destroying the item it was supposed to insert. Same with components occasionally breaking on their own.
The original sin of the medical and social sciences is failing to recognize a distinction between exploratory research and confirmatory research and behave accordingly.
You only know whether it works when the study has been completed. You also only know whether the drug has (potentially) disastrous consequences when the study has been completed. Thus, I am not completely sure whether your claim holds.
The anti-aging serum could work (i.e. make you older), but have strong negative side effects.
And no, it's not reasonable to assume I meant "work" as in, "have an anti-aging serum that has strong negative side effects."
So I'm making a guess here that you play with few monsters or non-aggressive monsters?
Aggressively building turret walls, defensive train lines, and so on very quickly pays dividends here. Particularly if you claim as much territory as you can each time you expand instead of simply defending what you've built out.
If done this way building/improving defenses and managing enemies becomes a task you maintain every so often and doesn't spill over into the reliability of your base.
That's not necessarily true in social sciences. When you're working with large survey datasets, many variables are significantly related. That doesn't mean these relationships are meaningful or causal, they could be due to underlying common causes, etc. (Maybe social sciences weren't included in "real science" - but there's where a lot of stats discussions focus)
But I definitely agree it’d be nice to go back and show something is true to p=.0001 or whatever. Overwhelmingly solid evidence is truly a wonderful thing, and as you say, it’s really the only way to build a solid foundation.
When you engineer stuff, it needs to work 99.99-99.999% of the time or more. Otherwise you’re severely limited to how far your machine can go (in terms of complexity, levels of abstraction and organization) before it spends most of its time in a broken state.
I’ve been thinking about this while playing Factorio: so much of our discussion and mental modeling of automation works under the assumption of perfect reliability. If you had SLIGHTLY below 100% reliability in Factorio, the game would be a terrible grind limited to small factories. Likewise with mathematical proofs or computer transistors or self driving cars or any other kind of automation. The reliability needs to be insanely good. You need to add a bunch of nines to whatever you’re making.
A counterpoint to this is when you’re in an emergency and inaction means people die. In that case, you need to accept some uncertainty early on.