[Ifkaluva]

I think it’s the opposite—you start out bright eyed and busy tailed thinking you will do something big over the next five years…

You find out your idea has been tried, five different ways, all of them failed. Two of your follow up ideas were already done, and had some impact but not as much as expected. Finally you have an idea nobody has done, you try it and it flops—maybe somebody had tried it before but their results were so bad they couldn’t publish.

Then in the end you have done a tiny increment over the state of the art, and you want to persuade the PhD committee this is enough and they should let you graduate.

[danaris]

I mean, part of the systemic problem here is that "results were so bad they couldn't publish."

That shouldn't ever be a thing. As long as your methods are sound, it should never matter whether your results are just completely random noise; that's still an important result.

[Ifkaluva]

Right :) I was trying to write the bleakest possible version, and in the bleakest, your own unpublished idea is not actually original, it’s just a failure of the system to record negative results.