Isn't it sufficient to explain the author's data to say that academia is an environment with a high tolerance for flakiness? The fact that professors' flakiness

Isn't it sufficient to explain the author's data to say that academia is an environment with a high tolerance for flakiness? The fact that professors' flakiness usually works out in their favor just follows from people usually acting in a self-interested way. If I forgot about our meeting, on average I'm going to spend that time doing something that benefits me. I've definitely had the experience of some academics using absent-mindedness for dominance, but that doesn't mean it always or even usually is. A datapoint here is that in my experience fields that are larger and more practical/"applied" have a lot less absent-mindedness. (You could probably quantify this with e-mail response times.) But the hot fields are more competitive than the sleepy backwaters---if absent-mindedness were a dominance tactic, wouldn't we see more of it in the bigger fields?