Comment by pas

... with all due respect to folks who choose the hard and extremely frustrating academic career path, the inefficiency is so absurd that it truly only can exist in these gigantic institution-sized machines. (And in similar sized corporate money-makers.)

Most papers are fundamentally flawed, unfortunately, due to lacking sufficient information and data for replication, being underpowered (and not controlling for many factors).

It took decades to get to some minimally sensible standards (preregistration, conflict of interest declarations, awareness of the most common stats issues, power analysis), but we're still far from doing effective science.

Money is still handed out based on feels, hypes, name recognition (when it's not blinded) for laughably small projects, instead of focusing on establishing longer term ones and/or improving the actual science output (ie. data and hypothesis generation) of existing ones.

(Yes, of course, academia approximates this. Yes, yes. Everything's fine. We'll have a usable model of Alzheimer's any second now! Aaany second. Just let this new totally effective model of depression/obesity/learning/ME-CFS out of the door first.)