This quandary is a great argument for never becoming an academic researcher. It would seem to me that science needs to eliminate "career bias" or "mortgage bia

This quandary is a great argument for never becoming an academic researcher. It would seem to me that science needs to eliminate "career bias" or "mortgage bias" or "ramen bias" from its results. Negative results need to be just as publishable as significant results. If I were tyrant of the Ivory Tower, I would decree that results be blinded until after acceptance for publication. I would further decree that prestige be allocated such that the first and second replications have equal prestige to an original publication, and successive replications are worth less prestige, but are still worth attempting. The only failed experiment is one that does not advance the body of human knowledge. Negative results still let us know that one thing was tried, and it didn't work--it crosses off one line in a process of elimination. And those that fudge data and methods to produce the appearance of a result, and those that are so flawed as to be non-reproducible, are failures in that sense, even if they still allow for the career advancement of a few people.