You're absolutely right. What's good for civilization is to advance scientific understanding and knowledge. To take risks, because sometimes they pan out! So go on, pour resources into a thousand crazy ideas. Something will work out eventually.

Yet, what's good for the academic? Each effort costs potentially years of your life. A great discovery will catapult you to the stars, a small one will advance your career, and a negative finding does nothing. You're not alone, you have peers competing for the next round of funding, tenured position, or residency. There are literally never enough to go around, and each will judge applicants in part on their record of results.

I think you're describing a conflict between what's valuable for a system at scale and what's valuable for individual actors within it.

If you want to find nothing without hurting your career, spend your time reproducing other people's results. Lots of the time you will find what they found, which doesn't help your career much. But sometimes you'll find frauds or mistakes, and that will help your career and our civilization quite a lot.

That's very optimistic. More likely you will be disliked by your peers for, in their view, actively trying to demolish their reputation. There's a lot of politics in academia and it's way better to just try to be friends and never say bad words of other peoples works. Live and let live. Is this good for the public and "Science" in capital letters? No. But it's how it is.

Perhaps it is, but you don't have to reproduce the work of your direct colleagues.

Specialties are usually small worlds where everyone knows everyone, reviews, funding grants recommendations flow between them, as do postdocs and graduate students. Stirring up as little water as possible and playing into the hands of the others is incentivized.

This is highly dependent on the discipline and particular field.

For topics with a large number of practicing labs that make use of relatively accessible tooling you might be able to pull off such an approach.

Other fields require customized, incredibly expensive instrumentation. Physics and certain areas of biomedical research are examples of this. It's not uncommon that fewer than ten labs in the entire world will have the capability to perform a particular highly specialized technique.

Even in the largest fields though, it will be your peers reviewing your grant applications at the end of the day.

It’s a question of resource allocation too. To advance science, you want to give more resources and control to people who can potentially make the best discoveries and breakthroughs. How do you find these people? Currently, it seems to be this competition with papers published on the best journals with high citation numbers.