I don't know about hard CS, and I don't know about that word "corrupt" because it implies malice and I think that Hanlon's Razor is probably a useful heuristic

I don't know about hard CS, and I don't know about that word "corrupt" because it implies malice and I think that Hanlon's Razor is probably a useful heuristic here. But, in machine learning, I've see plenty of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Papers often introduce new algorithms or techniques whose improvement over the competition can plausibly be attributed to excessively tuned hyperparameters that overfit the data on one or more benchmarks. It's really not all that far removed from p-hacking in my opinion.