Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. [...] Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it’s mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.
This assumes the median researchers can’t recognize who the competent researchers are, or otherwise don’t look to them as thought leaders.
I’m not arguing that this isn’t often the case, just that it isn’t always the case. In engineering, if you’re more competent than everyone else, you can make cooler shit. If you’re a median engineer trying to figure out which memes to take on and spread, you’re going to be drawn to the work of the more competent engineers because it is visibly and obviously better.
In fields where distinguishing between bad research and good research has to be done by knowing how to do good research, rather than “does it fly or does it crash”, then the problem you describe is much more difficult to avoid. I argue that the difference between the fields which replicate and those which don’t is as much about the legibility of the end product as it is about the quality of the median researcher.
This assumes the median researchers can’t recognize who the competent researchers are, or otherwise don’t look to them as thought leaders.
I’m not arguing that this isn’t often the case, just that it isn’t always the case. In engineering, if you’re more competent than everyone else, you can make cooler shit. If you’re a median engineer trying to figure out which memes to take on and spread, you’re going to be drawn to the work of the more competent engineers because it is visibly and obviously better.
In fields where distinguishing between bad research and good research has to be done by knowing how to do good research, rather than “does it fly or does it crash”, then the problem you describe is much more difficult to avoid. I argue that the difference between the fields which replicate and those which don’t is as much about the legibility of the end product as it is about the quality of the median researcher.