I think the author is correctly describing a phenomenon at some level and the DDOS analogy isn't such a bad one. But I think they're kind of misidentifying the

I think the author is correctly describing a phenomenon at some level and the DDOS analogy isn't such a bad one. But I think they're kind of misidentifying the nature of the cause at some level. In some ways it's a bit worse than what they're outlining because at least in my opinion it's more systemic. That is, the problem isn't so much that there's a small number of "real geniuses" getting drowned out by a bunch of noise, it's that there are actually a large number of geniuses who are incentivised by their P&T committee, or college, or grants program officer, or advisor, or whoever, to create the sea that everyone is drowning in. Even when people want to do the right thing, they might not be able to. It doesn't end with tenure either, I can vouch for that. The late Peter Higgs is kind of a good example in this regard. In a lot of ways he was one of those classical physicists from past era, and even he pointed out that he wouldn't have a professor position today, and that people were wanting to get rid of him. Where the DDOS analogy kind of falls flat is that DDOSes don't generally have echoing effects that result in positive (or negative, depending on how you look at it) feedback loops. I guess I saw the author as pointing to a real problem but being a little off about the cause, or at least not recognizing the complexity of the causes as they really exist and focusing on only one small part of it. I think that you're spot on in a lot of ways, that some of the biggest problems are from people who are smart, but then also motivated by the wrong things, and so leverage the whole system to those aims and then rely on survivorship bias to justify the whole thing.