So to rephrase the point as I understand you making it: Publishing results that omit information which might indicate shortcommings (whether intentionally to hide these or just because of them not obviously contributing) leads all later researchers to be left in the blue as to these shortcommings (possibly in the way of unknown unknowns).
I’d guess that this can be a compound effect if bad studies build on bad studies some time later no clear results can be obtained at all anymore.
Seems related to Technical Debt where insufficient cleanup and refactoring causes a decline in quality mostly because a) nobody can rely on anything working in all cases as expected and b) inability to understand all the non-uniform treatment of obscure exceptions.
Yes, exactly. It is better to have such incomplete studies than to have none at all, but… And it’s not even ‘bad’, in these particular cases, just very inconvenient for other people. And potentially costly, too, if they don’t notice the lack of information in time and end up wasting materials, some of which—like the roots that have to be stained—might be very few.
So to rephrase the point as I understand you making it: Publishing results that omit information which might indicate shortcommings (whether intentionally to hide these or just because of them not obviously contributing) leads all later researchers to be left in the blue as to these shortcommings (possibly in the way of unknown unknowns).
I’d guess that this can be a compound effect if bad studies build on bad studies some time later no clear results can be obtained at all anymore.
Seems related to Technical Debt where insufficient cleanup and refactoring causes a decline in quality mostly because a) nobody can rely on anything working in all cases as expected and b) inability to understand all the non-uniform treatment of obscure exceptions.
Yes, exactly. It is better to have such incomplete studies than to have none at all, but… And it’s not even ‘bad’, in these particular cases, just very inconvenient for other people. And potentially costly, too, if they don’t notice the lack of information in time and end up wasting materials, some of which—like the roots that have to be stained—might be very few.