[chatwinra]

"universities and funding agencies [should].. stop rewarding researchers who publish copiously"

You have to look at the media as well. When was the last time you read an article about a failed experiment, ie: an hypothesis was DISPROVED? There's rare/no coverage of this yet it is an important aspect of science[1], and ties into what the OP talks about.

If we're going to improve how science is done, this is an equally important area to focus on because it's the current bias for positive results that plays a part in driving labs to produce lots of papers.

1 - https://www.elsevier.com/connect/scientists-we-want-your-neg...

[Practicality]

Agreed. It could be as simple as improving how negative results are reported. Mythbusters was all about disproving theories and the general public loves it.

(Yes, most disproved hypotheses don't involve explosions, but you can still make the reports interesting, because everything that is not true has broad implications)

[6DM]

We'll they do when there's common myths that get disproved. Like that guy who cracked his knuckles on only one hand for nearly all of his life. But yeah I get your point.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/03/13/health-myth-is-crac...

[PJDK]

Thats the only time when things have a general interest. Negative results are very important to people directly involved in studying something but what general interest (or value) is there in a story "chemical xyz123 does not work as an effective catalyst for the reaction between abc123 and def678" for anyone not directly researching those things?

[6DM]

There is no interest to the general public. But that doesn't mean scientists can't carve out their own online community like Wikipedia and start to categorize all of this information. It would for them probably be what stackoverflow is to programmers.