[ruaraidh]

"high-risk, high-reward" science sounds great, until you suddenly have a replication crisis on your hands. Big, exciting results already attract more attention than good, careful, journeyman science, despite generally being, well, wrong.

[c1ccccc1]

That's an important thing to keep in mind, but it also seems like the replication crisis is being fuelled by a kind of risk averse attitude. Something like "if you want to get funding and have your career go well, you need to make sure you're regularly producing positive results". From that point of view, not only is ambitious research (working on the most important problems in a field) risky, but so is any research that might not produce positive results. The safe path for scientists is to churn out a load of low quality papers where they're already pretty sure in advance what results they expect to get. And the replication crisis is a natural result. Careful science is in a sense just as risky as ambitious science, and God help anyone trying to carefully work on a hard and important problem.

To be clear, I'm not blaming scientists too much for having this attitude. I think the surrounding incentives play a large part, in particular how bad the job security is for a lot of scientists. Probably a lot of the people who would be working carefully on risky things ended up not being able to get a job.