@thetransmitter
Tough argument to make, nicely done. I feel similarly about big institutes and standardized collabs - super valuable but shouldnt be the only thing. The trick is to make those smaller studies cumulative. Since we do know that underpowered studies have a high risk of both false positives and negatives, how to avoid the usual boom-bust cycle of blockbuster nature paper -> hundreds of quietly failed replications, etc.
So being in defense of smaller studies necessarily needs a positive vision for infrastructures to communicate, tweak, share, reimplement those experimental paradigms, as well as put them in relation to one another so we get a landscape of attempts at similar phenomena rather than the wash of disconnected papers and full file drawers thats currently the norm. I have always been surprised at the lack of tooling for in-scanner behavior. Big magnet is tricky and constrains materials and designs, but it seems odd to me that we'll spend a bazillion dollars on scanner time and participant recruitment but comparatively little on tooling for having them do interesting things once theyre in there - let alone tooling that allows for flexible experiment design, adaptation to dissimilar hardware, etc.
jonny
NicoleCRust