> Realistically yes, science and academia are loaded with "waste”

Yes!

> The problem is that we don't know ex ante which questions fall into that category

No! You’re acting like we have no idea what might happen if we make another observational study of some minor variant of the same question we’ve been asking for 20+ years.

This is not some magical ability that I have. It’s just the willingness to say that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, and not waffle on obviously derivative work, simply because that work tickles my political fancies.

> and it's not scientists' jobs to be doing the action part,

Cop out. Nobody is asking scientists to solve the problem. The request is merely to stop wasting time and money doing work that cannot possibly discover anything new, even if done exceptionally well. The Nth marginal observational study into structural determinants of disease X in location Y adds nothing to our knowledge, has no ability to add anything, and probably isn’t even done well in the first place. Yet there are hundreds of these things published every year.

The truth is that this kind of derivative research gets done not because of demand or pure intellectual interest, but because that's what the funding agencies are willing to fund. We should stop that.

> while one could argue we have all the knowledge we need,

No! There’s tons of things we don’t know. The people wasting their time on this work should be forced to investigate those questions, instead of re-treading the same tired topics.