This Guardian piece about bad incentives in science was getting a lot of Twitter mileage yesterday. “Cut-throat academia leads to natural selection of bad science,” the headline screams.
The article is reporting on a new paper by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath, and features quotes from the authors like, “As long as the incentives are in place that reward publishing novel, surprising results, often and in high-visibility journals above other, more nuanced aspects of science, shoddy practices that maximise one’s ability to do so will run rampant.”
Well. Can’t disagree with that.
But when I clicked through to read the journal article, the case didn’t seem nearly so strong. The article has two parts. The first is a review of review pieces published between 1962 and 2013 that examined the levels of statistical power reported in studies in a variety of academic fields. The second is a formal model of an evolutionary…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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