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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

One receives grants for doing new research and writing papers about that research. There's no financial incentive for reviewing the existing body of work, and since one needs money to eat, guess what doesn't get done?

It's basically a case of lots of people are talking and few of them are listening. It's understandable that a lot of trash talk gets ignored.

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That's not true, because a very common way of getting a new idea is to start from something existing and then extend it.

Thus a pretty standard task for any PhD student is to reproduce someone's published result as the first step towards testing the new idea. And even if you start by assuming some previous work is correct, frequently you will end up reproducing it in some what because you want to sanity check the extension you built on top of it.

The overwhelming majority of the groups doing those extensions are the same groups who did the original research, and the increments are oftentimes so small that they don't expose the flaws in the underlying body of work.

I guess… how do we get people paid for reviewing? It’s an interesting point that the incentives are not helping us here.

The whole academic world gets increasingly ignored due to the lack of care from its participants. We all need to eat but I believe all are far from hunger and many seek good and wealthy life on top. Ironically they chose wrong profession then, there are better paying professions and occupation with less brainpower to spend.

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