Finally – someone with the balls to admit what’s going on: you have thousands of otherwise-unemployable “scientists” floating around who need to make their mark and get funds. What better way than to tell the government what they want to hear.
Incredible story:
I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published
I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.
Multiply this by about 1,000 other scumbags all doing the same thing, and you end up with horrible policy like closing down nuke plants and replacing them with fucking PINWHEELS!!
One of my favorite excerpts:
It starts with the fact that a researcher’s career depends on his or her work being cited widely and perceived as important. This triggers the self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs, and of course, accolades.
But as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years—there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s—it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.