The trouble is that researchers and universities also act like marketers, and also even different factions within a single company will act like marketers to se

The trouble is that researchers and universities also act like marketers, and also even different factions within a single company will act like marketers to self-promote their work in order to compete for a better bonus or promotion or something. Since regression type analyses are so amenable to this, and it's so easy to data mine for arbitrary thresholds of success, like "significance" levels, the problem tends to spiral out of control. I wish it was just confined to advertisers and SEO stuff. But the ugly truth is that if you peel back the layers in many organizations that claim to do "quantitative" or "data-driven" business, it's just more of this same poor statistical hygiene.