[3grdlurker]

If you have a team of programmers who always miss their deadlines, will increasing the headcount necessarily make them a team that always meets the deadlines? No, because other than having more people means more distractions and need for communication, there might be other problems, such as technical debt, or miscommunicated requirements, or inexperience, or outright unreasonable demands.

The only variable that increasing the headcount necessarily improves is the headcount itself.

[cercatrova]

No but increasing the number of teams who are all now competing with each other would probably allow us to see progress scaling with the number of teams, not necessarily putting everyone on the same team.

[3grdlurker]

Science discoveries don't just happen because there are more people "competing" to solve a problem. The more likely outcome of what you're saying is that you'd only have more teams competing, sure, but to redo each other's work.

[ALittleLight]

The replication crisis suggests to me that we'd probably benefit from lots of repeated work.

[forcry]

As an outside observer, replication crisis appear to more a result of other things like "publish or perish" and other politics in academics

[username90]

They don't even compete to solve the problem, they compete for funding. People who are better at politics gets more funding, so adding more people could even be net negative with them draining up all the funding from those who do the actual research.