Contagion 2020

[Shuto Makino]

You nailed it in your edit that nearly any good work that's being done is in spite of the system not because of it.

All the professors I admire can't believe what academia has become, especially the salami slicing of uninteresting work that's turned into numerous individual publications. Full of careerists creating pish, delegitimising it for the minority that give a shit.

Yeah, although a lot of the people publishing the iffy research know themselves that it doesn't need to be out there. Part of the 'publish or perish' environment is that, for all you might want to have high-minded principles about not contributing to a corrupted system, if you just refuse in a field where you need to publish then you won't change it at all and will also be unemployed. There are definitely some hard-nosed careerists around, but even people who aren't like that still need to act like it anyway.

Don't want to derail the thread too much with academic navel-gazing, but like any bad system, it forces even well-intentioned individuals within it to behave badly if they want to succeed.