Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

There is always a push to do original research. Maybe a partial solution here is that it is encouraged, even required, to take up a major and a minor specialty. The major one you do original research and the minor one you work to reproduce existing research. Building that in from the start would go a long way of creating a culture of trust but verify in these fields.

View on HN

Not sure how it is in all fields but at least in the molecular bio world there's a lot more replication than meets the eye. Especially methods, it's just that there won't be a replication paper, it'll be in the methods/supplementary info of the new research paper ("we used xyz techniques as described in researcher et al").

Null publishing bias still exists and obviously it's not remotely a perfect system. However, it's not some sort of completely broken system where every paper is either fraud or replication, and interventions that start from that sort of an assumption (people are very aware of the need to trust but verify) are in my opinion unlikely to be useful.

If the world is at a 60/100, you need to focus on things that get you from 60 to 80, not from 0 to 20

Seems like wishful thinking, much like saying engineers at Amazon can do whatever they want despite what Bezos says. Yes, they can, but they'd get fired. And yes, incentives could be changed, but they won't, because the person running the organization doesn't want to.

Research funding and research institutions are existing things, that operate in specific ways. One can lobby to change this, but unless you want to go back to the "gentleman scientist" model of the 1700s and 1800s, and a scientific establishment about 1% the size of the one today, you can't just buck the system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com