| ▲ | Tomte a day ago | |
Good luck finding an advisor/a department that awards PhDs for that. “It’s not novel”. | ||
| ▲ | pinkmuffinere 8 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I think you're right that this will be the most common objection, but wrong that it will be exceedingly difficult to find an advisor that would support this. I assume that if you _can_ overturn some foundational result, you won't face criticism over novelty (potentially you can argue that overturning important accepted results is inherently novel). Then the rest is just math: Assume that n% of foundational studies are demonstrably incorrect if replication were attempted. Then if you replicate X foundational studies, there's a 1 - (1-n/100)^X chance that you'll show one foundational study to be incorrect. Then I think you just need to find an advisor who believes the incorrectness rate n, and the replication attempts X is high enough for you to revert a foundational study over the course of your PhD. | ||