Academic research is in trouble. You don't get rewarded for asking big questions. You don't get rewarded for learning new things. You get rewarded for publishing papers, and especially if your papers get referenced by other people. The result is we spend billions of dollars on "research" that can't be replicated, that few people care about.
And then you have the people gaming the system.
The YouTube currency is views. The academic currency is citations. And as I just recently learned, you can buy citations the same way you can buy YouTube views. A team of researchers looked into this newest attempt to play the research game and succeeded in engineering the world’s most highly cited cat. Yes, a cat.
There are also instances of people publishing papers who list authors who have been dead for a long time. Centuries, or millennia, in the case of Pythagoras.
This is Sabine Hossenfelder's video Cat Becomes Well-Cited Scholar With New Scam Method
Sabine Hossenfelder wonders if the insanity means that we are near the end of academic research. While the cat story is amusing, it isn't limited to cats. Researchers do a similar thing when they try to explain an anomaly, and reference each others' work. Over and over again.
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