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You could randomize replications a bit, take away the choice. Or make it so that if you replicated one group's result, you can't replicate them again next time. The key is a bit of distance, a bit of neutrality. Enough jitter to break up cliques.

I don't work in academia but in my experience professors are basically all intellectually arrogant and ego-driven, and would relish having time and space to beat each other at the brain game. A failed replication is their chance to be "the smarter guy in the room" and crack open some long-held belief. A successful replication would probably happen most of the time and be far more boring.

I could imagine, if such a thing were mandated and in place for a while, one could build her career on replications, as a prosecutor or defense. She would publish new research solely to convince her colleagues that she is sharp enough to play prosecutor or defense.

Anything has got to be better than what we have now, where apparently you can cheat and defraud your way through an entire decades-spanning career.



The tricky thing with randomizing is that science gets very specialized, both with equipment required and knowledge. So there may only be a handful of people whose work you can competently replicate.

And those same people are reviewing the papers you publish and will not hesitate to sabotage your career if you have made them look bad by failing to replicate their papers.




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