I think the performative, results-based culture of academia in general (particularly in Asia and not just Chinese) has seriously succumbed to Goodhart's law: ht

I think the performative, results-based culture of academia in general (particularly in Asia and not just Chinese) has seriously succumbed to Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law Because you are judged on citations, publication count in prestigious journals, and research dollars spent... you have people citing themselves and their friends in citation rings, gaming the referee process to pick reviewers, and doing unethical things for money. My first experience in this is when I was asked (as a postdoc) to give a keynote for a no-name conference in Vancouver. They were paying so why not? I later realized that my pedigree was being used to lend credence to a conference that was totally cargo cult academia. There were conference sessions, and people presenting, and bunches of people in several rooms, but nothing was actually being said and nothing was being done. They then offered me $3,000 cash in an envelope which I declined to take most of because of ethical reasons (I only wanted to cover my expenses). A very unique, maybe even out-of-body experience to stay the least. If you want to see a crazy instantiation of cargo cult academia, google "extreme learning machines", which is basically a whole field built off of 2-layer feedforward neural networks with 1 randomly initialized layer. The other keynote at this conference was the guy who "started" this field.