A priori it seems like a good guess. In any academic discipline, at the thesis level and above, originality is necessary for your work to be perceived as having any value, But most complicated questions with one true answer have a thousand false answers. Once people have beaten you to the true answer, it’s going to be easier to be original if you go for one of the false ones, so long as you’re in a discipline where verifying truth or falsehood is harder than obscuring it.
I suspect a good bellwether for identifying such disciplines is the way they treat repetition of existing truths. A lemma in a math paper might be “obvious”, a paper with too many obvious lemmas might be “too verbose”, but there’s never any suggestion that the lemmas are “trite” or that the reviewers would prefer to read their converses instead.
A priori it seems like a good guess. In any academic discipline, at the thesis level and above, originality is necessary for your work to be perceived as having any value, But most complicated questions with one true answer have a thousand false answers. Once people have beaten you to the true answer, it’s going to be easier to be original if you go for one of the false ones, so long as you’re in a discipline where verifying truth or falsehood is harder than obscuring it.
I suspect a good bellwether for identifying such disciplines is the way they treat repetition of existing truths. A lemma in a math paper might be “obvious”, a paper with too many obvious lemmas might be “too verbose”, but there’s never any suggestion that the lemmas are “trite” or that the reviewers would prefer to read their converses instead.