This is a key aspect. There is a pressure (both institutional and self-imposed) to produce something original and unique, so trying to reproduce other people results is seen as a lost of time.
Either you confirm previous results, which is nice but not something you can publish or write a thesis about; or you find they are wrong and then you have to tell the authors, which is something they may appreciate or not, and be exhaustive to prove it, which is something in which you may be interested or not.
What I would like to see is that PhD students were required to reproduce some previous results as part of their thesis. This would increase the quality of scientific results and would prepare the candidates to do their own research (at difference of now, that they are put on front of a laboratory to get "interesting results" and they don't know what to do with it).
Agreed -- would also love to see an incentive structure around publishing negative results. One of the areas of research I think is the most exciting is artificial photosynthesis, and it's currently at the phase where the researchers are trying to discover efficiency gains by just trying out a bunch of different materials.
Take this recent publication [1]:
> For water oxidation, the photoanode surface was protected from corrosion by a 62.5 nm
layer of amorphous, hole-conducting TiO2 that was grown by atomic-layer deposition (ALD).
> The TiO2 layer
significantly improves the stability of III-V photoanodes in a tandem structure for water
oxidation while the tandem structure produces sufficient photovoltage to sustain the efficient,
unassisted production of hydrogen by water splitting in aqueous alkaline electrolytes.
They discovered that coating the photoanode with 62.5nm of TiO2 helps stabilize the reaction. But who knows how many materials they went through to get that one? And how many different coating thicknesses they tried before settling of 62.5nm? This tech could be next-gen solar, would be great to see the global rate of discovery increase. Perhaps YC Research can start this trend?
Some things in science have become "immoral" to question. In a big way evolution, including macro evolution, has become the religion of science. If you even entertain the idea that macro evolution has not been happening, you might be labeled an evil heretic. You might be labeled anti-science. You might be laughed out of your field. You could get fired from your job. You might lose all your funding. All of this could happen even if you go about your research, testing, and analysis in a very objective, scientific way.
Either you confirm previous results, which is nice but not something you can publish or write a thesis about; or you find they are wrong and then you have to tell the authors, which is something they may appreciate or not, and be exhaustive to prove it, which is something in which you may be interested or not.
What I would like to see is that PhD students were required to reproduce some previous results as part of their thesis. This would increase the quality of scientific results and would prepare the candidates to do their own research (at difference of now, that they are put on front of a laboratory to get "interesting results" and they don't know what to do with it).