You’re demonstrating the fundamental misunderstanding of science the Golden Goose page refers to. It’s expected - and a necessary part of science - that not all papers succeed.

The funny thing about this is that, unlike UBI or whatever, the societal returns on investment in science research are huge and indisputable. Nothing else in human history has improved our condition or knowledge or quality of life as much or as fast. You’re typing your opinions into a box that came out of large numbers of papers, some of which were criticized for their pointlessness. You’re absolutely barking up the wrong tree.

You might interpret an uncited dead end as a substantial contribution to evolution of science, but I see it as it is; a dead end.

Let's end this thread because I don't see any chance of finding any agreement.

You simply don’t know that. It’s not even relevant whether your uninformed prediction turns out to be correct later, that would be random luck. You cannot tell what will happen in the future.

And why don’t you understand that having research and papers in the system that don’t lead to anything is actually a good thing, both expected and necessary?

Read a little more about the Golden Goose awards, about research that was ridiculed and languished until it didn’t. There are lots of papers that seemed like a dead end until long after they were published. The entire field of Neural Networks is now combing prematurely presumed dead end research from 40+ years ago.

Maybe you can fix it, but you do seem to be completely missing the point of what science is. Investment in science, and the associated research and experiments, aim to increase knowledge. Science doesn’t necessarily aim for utility, and doing science is always taking a risk that the knowledge gained might not be useful. You can’t actually do science without taking that risk, and we can’t have papers that make huge progress without papers that make no progress.

You can’t tell what investments will pay off until they do. You can only be sure the technology in your computer wasn’t pointless because it already worked out, despite lots of naive people like you claiming it was pointless at the time.

The good news is that our investments in science are paying off big time, and those investments include all the dead end papers ever written. The sum total, even with all uncited papers in the world, is that we are much better off having spent the money on science than not.