I think there's another subtle or not-so subtle effect, which is pure peer pressure and trying to anticipate what will be popular. That is, the system is curren

I think there's another subtle or not-so subtle effect, which is pure peer pressure and trying to anticipate what will be popular. That is, the system is currently structured such that no one wants to put money into something that won't work. The problem with this is that that's almost required if you don't know what's going on: you have to fund a bunch of studies, 90% of which will fail, to find the 10% that don't. But no one -- absolutely no one -- will get credit for a failed but good attempt at trying something reasonable. So instead people just keep doing the obvious. It's like this with tons of biomedical research: chasing authority figures and popular trends. I don't think the people doing it are evil, or are necessarily consciously aware of what they're doing, it's just everyone is incentivized this way. I'm not even sure they "honestly believe in what they're doing" sometimes, I think it's more a sense of "this is our best guess" where "best guess" is defined as "popular". It's like FOMO with this alternative of proposing shots in the dark being the thing that no one talks about because it won't get grant dollars and if if fails, won't result in any credit. The whole mentality is backwards to me. It's as if space agencies kept sending probes around the earth because we don't know much about what's further out in the solar system. We don't do that because instead we celebrate the information gained about other planets, not whether or not that information conforms to some particular a priori hypothesis of a particular person. Add in indirect funds dependence and you have a recipe for perpetuating the obvious.