Isn’t a “researcher’s basic income” just another word for, um… tenure? I think the proper solution is to tighten standards for what’s considered “good” research (fix the replication crisis) and to increase the status of other sorts of scholarship which aren’t highly valued at present (at least in STEM) but are very much needed, such as review articles and in-depth monographs. These things don’t have the problem where only an unambiguously “positive” result demonstrates the value of one’s scholarship, and reaching positive results is largely a matter of luck.
The author does suggest a system where “academic researchers are rewarded for running high quality studies with these sorts of attributes, regardless of outcome”, but, barring highly-selective preregistration, I’m not sure how this can work—other things being equal, an unambiguous outcome does signal a higher-quality study, so researchers will always prefer clear (i.e. “positive”) outcomes.
I think historically, most of the gain of increasing cooperation has occurred not by opposing tribalism, but rather by channeling it in broadly socially-useful directions. Democrats and Republicans might not kill each other, but that’s not because they aren’t “tribes” of some sort. Indeed, it’s not clear how politics itself could even work absent some degree of ‘tribalism’ (which should rather be called factionalism, but never mind that) as a basic organizing principle.