Comment by Stratoscope

I dislike feigned surprise as much as you do, but I don't see it in GP's comment. My read is that it was a slightly satirical checklist of how academic incentives can lead to immoral behavior and sometimes do.

I don't think it's fair to say "by feigning surprise you're implying..." That seems to be putting words in GP's mouth. Specifically, they didn't say that we shouldn't imagine a better world. They were only describing one unfortunate aspect of today's academic world.

Here is a personal example of feigned surprise. In November 2012 I spent a week at the Google DC office getting my election results map ready for the US general election. A few Google engineers wandered by to help fix last-minute bugs.

Google's coding standards for most languages including JavaScript (and even Python!) mandate two-space indents. This map was sponsored by Google and featured on their site, but it was my open source project and I followed my own standards.

One young engineer was not pleased when he found out about this. He took a long slow look at my name badge, sighed, and looked me in the eye: "Michael... Geary... ... You... use... TABS?"

That's feigned surprise.

(Coda: I told him I was grateful for his assistance, and to feel free to indent his code changes any way he wanted. We got along fine after that, and he ended up making some nice contributions.)