Comment by chucksmash
4 days ago
It's like saying "if you know half of your advertising dollars are wasted, why don't you just cut your ad buy in half?"
I still remember the joke from my first job:
Q: How many people work at this office?
A: About half.
An apt analogy. Circling back to scientific research, I'm sure an investigator would be more than happy not to spend the time, effort, and grant money on a project that wasn't going to produce worthwhile results. If only we could know in advance without doing the work.
That does not, of course, mean that "most research being produced isn't really research, just people keeping busy" or whatever other nonsense an uninformed outsider feels like spewing.