[diffxx]

True story: I wrote my ph.d. thesis on a special case of a general problem. After about one year of work, I realized that the approach would never work for the general problem for intractable reasons. But I also really wanted to finish my ph.d. within 5 years, so I spent the next two years refining the work enough to be able to write a dissertation on it and ignored the fact that it would never really work for what it was intended. I did do some interesting work and learned a lot, but I couldn't really bring myself to try and publish the results (beyond my thesis) because I very clearly had not made an advance in the field. Of course, I do think it would have been useful to publish why I thought that essentially the entire field of inquiry was a dead end, but that would not have made me very popular with my collaborators or others in the field and it wouldn't likely have ingratiated me with anyone else.

[okwhateverdude]

Great, so the economic {dis|in}centives are keeping a bunch of people fed but doing useless study of a dead end and even kept you from pointing out the emperor has no clothes (assuming your epiphany is valid). Is social conformity holding back science?