> > The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution. > And they are also a very speci

> > The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution. > And they are also a very special case, with lots of intricacies and paranoia and not something that comes to mind when you ask people about rewarding merit and efficiency. The elephant in the room is however, what is merit and efficiency in academia. I would argue the attempt to somehow make scientific output measurable has led to the big problems plaguing academia today, salami publishing, churning out more and more papers with less and less results, making papers purposefully difficult to reproduce, time spend on applying for funding instead of research, crazy work hours... In many ways academia is similar to the military in that short term incentives are actually counterproductive to the end goal that you try to achieve. > Nobody is arguing that anything and everything must "only consist of natural laws". But to claim that something as basic as "more effort = more results" shouldn't be allowed to be real because it's too much of a natural law and has no place in civilized society sound ridiculous. Again the difficulty being what does more results mean and is it necessarily good. That being said I don't think artificially capping work hours (how even) would alleviate the situation, work hours are a symptom not the cause.