> the better approach here is to just shift the incentives.
Yes!
> Start funding replication
No :( That won't solve the problem, it'd just change shape. Funding people who produce fraudulent or incompetent papers won't stop being a problem if you ask them to produce a slightly different kind of paper. You just get fraudulent replications, fraudulent claims of failure to replicate, fraudulent rebuttals to claims of failure to replicate and so on.
The other thing this would do is sharply shift the distribution of papers towards those that are guaranteed to replicate, either because they prove things that are trivially true or because they prove things about simulated worlds that may or may not be connected to reality. Both categories of paper are already way too popular, nobody needs more.
Unfortunately, the incentives fix for this problem is so blindly simple it's also difficult to bring up in polite company, because lots of people have an allergic reaction to the implications. Look at places where science is being done at scale without replication crises or widespread fraud, and notice what's different about the incentives. Then ensure science is always done with those incentives.
Yes!
> Start funding replication
No :( That won't solve the problem, it'd just change shape. Funding people who produce fraudulent or incompetent papers won't stop being a problem if you ask them to produce a slightly different kind of paper. You just get fraudulent replications, fraudulent claims of failure to replicate, fraudulent rebuttals to claims of failure to replicate and so on.
The other thing this would do is sharply shift the distribution of papers towards those that are guaranteed to replicate, either because they prove things that are trivially true or because they prove things about simulated worlds that may or may not be connected to reality. Both categories of paper are already way too popular, nobody needs more.
Unfortunately, the incentives fix for this problem is so blindly simple it's also difficult to bring up in polite company, because lots of people have an allergic reaction to the implications. Look at places where science is being done at scale without replication crises or widespread fraud, and notice what's different about the incentives. Then ensure science is always done with those incentives.