It demonstrates efficiency and ability to do something complicated and challenging under time pressure. Maybe it shouldn't be considered a big academic achievement, but it's definitely an impressive practical achievement.
I don't think that being wrong looks bad. There are a lot of understandable ways to be wrong, and it's not like any of these labs are being dishonest about their level of confidence (you can't really be "wrong" if you're not overcommitted to a stance).
It's having these suspected dirty probes that they haven't investigated yet which is in particular what I'm talking about though. Since they made no particular experimental or theoretical breakthrough here, I just would have thought they would want to be meticulous about confirming an unexpected result. As you say, the point is to show their experimental capabilities.
> I don't think that being wrong looks bad. There are a lot of understandable ways to be wrong, and it's not like any of these labs are being dishonest about their level of confidence (you can't really be "wrong" if you're not overcommitted to a stance).
I'm not in the field, but I would have thought it would look pretty bad if they were wrong and their experiment had obvious sloppy practices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion apparently that sunk a few reputations.
I completely understand a private rush to replicate for the purpose of building on it and making new discoveries, but just to put rush out a confirm paper? I suspect it's less about demonstrating actual efficiency and ability and more about the paper mill.
I don't think that being wrong looks bad. There are a lot of understandable ways to be wrong, and it's not like any of these labs are being dishonest about their level of confidence (you can't really be "wrong" if you're not overcommitted to a stance).