Comment by nis0s

> Proclaiming that your work is a “promising first step” in your introduction, despite being fully aware that nobody will ever build on it.

Science produces discrete units which can be used in different ways, if not in their exact form from a preceding research. I am not sure it’s reasonable to say that existing ideas, even if not cited, are not inspirational (to the researchers themselves). Peer-review isn’t perfect, but I think that all accepted papers have something academically or scientifically relevant, even if there’s no guarantee that the paper will generate hundreds of subsequent citations. I think improving your subsequent work is more important, which includes mentioning why you think some previous work may not be as relevant anymore. This last step is often missing from many research papers.

I think the author is right that it doesn’t quite make sense to publish anything you know isn’t quite correct. But I can think of several papers in different fields which someone may think are “not quite correct”, but the goal of such papers, I think, is to demonstrate the power of low probability scenarios, or edge cases. Edge cases are important because they break expected behavior, and are often the root cause of system fragility, system evolution, or poor generalization in other systems.