This line of publishing, much like nutritional science, is great for scientists. You can fudge data into flip flopping conclusions every couple of years. Infinite papers = tenure.
And here's a reason science can die in complex societies: because people want to score points over engaging with it. On a surface level it's easy to say "suggestions are changing, therefore it's a scam." But it's also a highly-expected outcome of a field being actively researched! Working as intended = ammunition for those who want to play games instead.
That's not to say there is no fraud, or bad actors. It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
> But it's also a highly-expected outcome of a field being actively researched!
But that's the point. It isn't "research". It's meaningless busy work to justify a paycheck.
> It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
I disagree. The guy was offering his honest opinion. Your comment comes off as someone working in the industry selfishly trying to justify your existence.
It's expected for hypothesis that make up a field to converge over time towards something resembling "truth".
When hypothesis change wildly decade by decade (e.g. in nutrition research) without convergence, you can reason that the system isn't working as intended.
In the nutrition example, I think the lack of progress is due to inadequete data and tooling to tackle such a complex field, as well as the limitations imposed by ethical considerations.
Another issue is research bias due to funding from industry. I don't this should be as much of an issue since the efficacy of scientific methods should be mostly independent of funding source.
If you could earnestly profile even a few scientists who have personally flip-flopped their way to tenure like that, you'd surely have a red carpet welcome across a thousand podcasts and alt-media outlets
Heck, maybe you could even get tenure somewhere if you happened to have academic creds of your own.
Surely someone's done it? Are you familiar with any such profiles that you could share?
How not to get published: "The general consensus is right."
So although individuals may not flip-flop constantly, fields as a whole do. Pick almost any topic in almost any field (especially humanities) and read papers 10-20 years apart. There's a constant cycle.
The cycle becomes self reinforcing too, because now you can interact with previous criticisms (Dr. A said this, but Dr. B said he was wrong. In fact, A was correct because B neglected to consider...).
As someone who made their living publishing scientific papers for over a decade and amassed a track record that showed that I was pretty good at it, I can tell you from first hand experience that you are absolutely wrong about this.
A much better approximation to the truth would be something like this:
How not to get published: "Other authors are wrong."
How to get published: "These specific other authors are right, and I have built upon the solid foundation laid by their brilliant work to do this other thing that may or may not have any actual utility or be of interest to anyone."
[UPDATE] I actually did once publish a paper [1] that explicitly described (some of) the reasons that one of the then-leading theories in my field was wrong and how I thought it could be improved. It was more or less the beginning of the end of my career. I don't know if there was any causal relationship between these two events, but there was definitely a temporal one.
And now that I reflect upon it, it wasn't even me who pointed out the problem, I was actually just citing Ralph Hartley who had pointed out the problems seven years earlier. He was, AFAICT, never heard from again either.
You don't attack established authors and frameworks. The low hanging fruit I was referencing is choosing something easy to disprove such as "eggs kill" or "roman empire fell because lead poisoning". After these results are published, the process is reversed. You disprove "eggs don't kill" or "lead poisoning had no bearing on the fall of roman empire". Ad infinitum.
Yes, earnestly contributing your effort towards a controversial or unsettled issue is a good way to publish and make progress in your career.
And yes, some fields aren’t able to perform the kind of reliable science of physics or chemistry, and so end up with a lot of papers that just collectively oscillate around topics.
But I have a hard time seeing how that’s what the above commenter was suggesting.
Null hypothesis confirmation is not a good source of papers. Framing of problem is part of the craft. It's not a secret that there is a big reproducibility problem in science today. Why? Because problems and results are hand crafted to go from "let's disprove this... oh look I did it".
