Empirical research is not relevant anymore

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Empirical research is not relevant anymore". Your opponent's style: University professor

Empirical research is tiring, people cannot find out new gaps and areas. There are too many researchers

You're dead wrong - we're drowning in *bad* research, not good research. The real problem isn't too many researchers, it's too many academics churning out meaningless papers to keep their jobs while the biggest questions go unanswered.Look, while you're complaining about researcher fatigue, we're literally watching the next generation of scientists get wiped out by funding cuts. Harvard alone lost $2.6 billion in federal funding [1], and "these are the future scientists. We're losing a small generation of people who would become the scientists in the future" [2]. Your "too many researchers" problem? It's solving itself through mass layoffs. But here's what you're missing - those aren't the mediocre paper-pushers getting cut. It's the brilliant postdocs and graduate students who would have made the breakthroughs in 20 years. When All of Us expects to lose about 600 of 3000 full-time positions [3], we're not trimming fat - we're amputating muscle. The real tragedy isn't research fatigue - it's that we're abandoning the most promising avenues right when they're about to pay off. Every dollar we cut now costs us ten dollars in lost innovation later.

I agree that there are bad researchers. However, publishing a research paper is also too long, it discourages people to do meaningful research

You're absolutely backwards on this - the publishing timeline isn't discouraging meaningful research, it's the only thing preventing us from drowning in garbage. The current system takes 3-6 months on average, which seems reasonable when you realize what's at stake. Think about it: if COVID taught us anything, it's what happens when we rush research to publication. We got flooded with preprints that contradicted each other weekly, hydroxychloroquine hysteria, and dangerous misinformation spreading faster than the virus itself. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us exactly why we need that buffer time - to separate real science from wishful thinking. Your complaint about timeline is actually an argument for *more* rigorous review, not less. The problem isn't that good researchers are discouraged - it's that rushed, unnecessary or substandard papers are clogging the system because everyone's scrambling to publish anything to survive. The meaningful research isn't being held back by peer review - it's being buried under an avalanche of mediocre papers from people gaming the system. Fix the incentives, don't break the quality control.