It's an excellent analysis of the fundamental problems in academia, but "people should just act against their incentives" isn't really a solution. It really is

It's an excellent analysis of the fundamental problems in academia, but "people should just act against their incentives" isn't really a solution. It really is the incentives themselves that are the problem: just looking at number of publications and citations (or even: citations of articles in the journals that your articles happen to be published in as well) when determine who to fund or hire. The problem there is that we have those metrics, are relatively quick and easy to obtain, which are accepted because they are what's been used so far - even though plenty of research has pointed out their flaws yet [1]. And anything new that is proposed as a replacement of those metrics (whether other metrics, or other systems of evaluation) is dismissed for not being proven to live up to a standard that the currently used methods do not either, or for not being available quickly or easily enough. (Which is reasonable - e.g. it's not viable to read and properly evaluate all research of your applicants.) (Disclosure: I do volunteer for a project, https://plaudit.pub https://plaudit.pub, that tries to offer an alternative nevertheless.) [1] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...