I’ve been alluding to this for a while now: Less Research Is Needed

On my first day in (laboratory) research, I was told that if there is a genuine and important phenomenon to be detected, it will become evident after taking no more than six readings from the instrument. If after ten readings, my supervisor warned, your data have not reached statistical significance, you should [a] ask a different question; [b] design a radically different study; or [c] change the assumptions on which your hypothesis was based.
In health services research, we often seem to take the opposite view. We hold our assumptions to be self-evident. We consider our methodological hierarchy and quality criteria unassailable. And we define the research priorities of tomorrow by extrapolating uncritically from those of yesteryear. Furthermore, this intellectual rigidity is formalized and ossified by research networks, funding bodies, publishers and the increasingly technocratic system of academic peer review.
[…]
Whereas in the past, any observer could tell that an experiment had not ‘worked’, the knowledge generated by today’s multi-variable mega-studies remains opaque until months or years of analysis have rendered the findings – apparently at least – accessible and meaningful. This kind of research typically requires input from many vested interests: industry, policymakers, academic groupings and patient interest groups, all of whom have different reasons to invest hope in the outcome of the study. As Nic Brown has argued, debates around such complex and expensive research seem increasingly to be framed not by régimes of truth (what people know or claim to know) but by ‘régimes of hope’ (speculative predictions about what the world will be like once the desired knowledge is finally obtained). Lack of hard evidence to support the original hypothesis gets reframed as evidence that investment efforts need to be redoubled.[2] And so, instead of concluding that less research is needed, we collude with other interest groups to argue that tomorrow’s research investments should be pitched into precisely the same patch of long grass as yesterday’s.

Required reading. (Update – good stuff in the comments, too).