Ironically, scientists love to do this! Take a new area with promising results, hype the shit out of it until the worst and/or least ethical scientists truly cr

Ironically, scientists love to do this! Take a new area with promising results, hype the shit out of it until the worst and/or least ethical scientists truly create a pseudoscientific tangent out of it, and then drop the area entirely for a decade because now anything vaguely associated with it is taboo. Labeling real science as cargo cult science sounds to me like cargo cult science with extra steps. Granted such a violent burst doesn't always happen when an academic bubble is created. But at times I've found academic backlash to be shockingly irrational in its breadth. I think the most common factor is when the pseudoscience makes it to the point of having an impact on actual humans. But it is still sad to see a state when even tenured faculty will shy away from public discussion of certain questions because of vague associations, as it feels entirely unscientific to me. The funniest part is when the area reemerges with a new name, as if extremely surface level branding is actually important to receiving grants or publishing papers. Well I suppose it is unfortunately, but this is one of those cases that feels so thinly veiled it might as well be scientific satire. My personal favorite example is the galvanic skin response hype from 50+ years ago, which morphed into more of a fringe science primarily because of flaws with lie detection applications - flaws that should've been extremely obvious concerns to test just based on the OG literature + common scientific sense. In the last decade or so it's been revamped as electrodermal activity and unsurprisingly shown great promise for certain health applications. EDA is presently the main focus of a big group at MIT, it has been included in some Fitbit models, it is used in FDA approved devices for epilepsy monitoring, and overall the relevant publications per year keep trending back up. A far cry from the looks you'd get if you discussed galvanic skin response in certain supposedly scientific circles back in the day. In absolute numbers the rebranded GSR has actually already fully recovered from the couple decades of low research activity, though relative to total academic output now versus then it probably still has some distance to go.