>whether or not science ought to be the way you describe it, I'm assuming a charitable readership - but its frequently stated, and I agree, that industry is fo

>whether or not science ought to be the way you describe it, I'm assuming a charitable readership - but its frequently stated, and I agree, that industry is for high value things we know will work, science/research/academia is geared for less certain / more speculative projects difficult to commercialise yet. > If scientists aren't reading what their colleagues publish, that is not a failure of research Well, maybe? Or maybe the paper authors hoped the results would be amazing, but they were only mediocre [research issue]; but they decided they might as well publish after getting the results (which is good), and some people skimmed the abstract; but it wasn't as interesting to others as the authors hoped (diverse perspectives; good); or the whole field went a different direction; or the specific competition found a better technique/result in the interim [research issue] and got all the love. That's all just how research goes - doesn't mean anyone is failing to communicate necessarily. > This is not a failure of research, this is a failure of science. Maybe; maybe not. I agree there's lots of problems in science, but based on my limited experience, I'd expect and think its OK for lots of stuff to be unread; lots of dead ends. Lots of startups should fail too, that's not a bad thing; its like there's simply a high bayes error. IMO real failure is things like people making up data, or doing research they know is bunk (maybe they hacked their p-values or left out data, or something) or continuing research they discovered is useless but their Adviser is politically wedded to etc.