Comment by disgruntledphd2

> It's not necessarily about intellectualism. Science in modern times is plagued by publish or perish. Researchers just need to get things published to keep working, and negative results don't get published. So I think people often publish stuff without proper controls/missing confounding variables/inversion of causality/etc not out of ignorance, but because they know the conclusion is dubious - but if they don't publish, they're going to be out of a job.

This is very true. In my PhD research, I managed to perfectly predict the placebo effect using a random forest. Now, this was actually due to sampling variance, and the finding went away when I averaged over splits.

I often wonder if I'd still been in academia when this happened, if I would have been able to resist the siren call of a Nature/Science paper (and the consequent career benefits).