Comment by rhubarbtree

Na, not buying it.

Evolution creates a situation that encourages all sorts of terrible actions, and the vast majority of people choose to control their animal instincts.

Additionally: the people who encourage the performative research are the people who control grant review. And those people are the same people as the performative researchers.

A bunch of people figured they could make a career doing bs performative research and corrupted the whole system to serve them.