> The problem is that "winning the game" is about publications, tenure, and ... Totally. 100% with you there. I didn't mean researchers aren't doing those thin

> The problem is that "winning the game" is about publications, tenure, and ... Totally. 100% with you there. I didn't mean researchers aren't doing those things, but rather that papers built for those ends are probably not polluting 'science' as a whole. The body of work product is getting increasingly swampy, but the researchers are also the best positioned people in the world to sieve through it. A large part of their job is to sort out what a paper actually tested and what it actually observed to begin with. These 'game playing' papers are quite blatant in comparison to the kinds of problems researchers already need to look for. > What are the costs? I dunno, mis-education of the popular audience, for one, I guess. Maybe that doesn't matter, but, it kind of does? Totally agree. I personally find it kind of abhorrent. I also can't honestly tell you why beyond "because" and am pretty certain most people don't feel as strongly about it as I do. I try to be mindful of that, but I think it mostly just gets used when I end up playing devil's advocate. > And the opportunity cost of all the scientific labor being spent on "easiest to publish the most times" instead of what might be highest priority to discover. Sure thing. It also increases time spent on literature searches for all that, and will for quite some time even if things changed tomorrow. On the other hand, maybe it provides an easier on-ramp for teaching prospective researchers to be skeptical even if it's in a Paper, and even how to analyze them? At least it's nice to try to hope there's some benefit to all this.