>I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims.

I should have chosen my words more carefully; we can probably find 1000s of academics to dispute a lot of perspectives on academia.

> are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career.

So, leaving aside criticism of any particular field, and to take just one pretty big cross-discipline trend, there's this 'replication crisis' thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis (wiki links to plenty of reputable sources).

I find it difficult to reconcile that with the idea that incentives to over-inflate claims were 'basically absent from anyone with a career'.

Maybe we think everyone was just really bad at statistics?

The replication crisis is a real example of an incentive problem rampant in the current system. However, this leads to a disproportionate emphasis on original research. Accusing it of leading to the things you talked about is a non sequitur.

Again, by no means is academia perfect. But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars is both incorrect and unhelpful in solving actual problems, that's all.

And yeah. I would say that most people would benefit from regular refreshers on statistics... in or out of academia.

> Accusing it of leading to the things you talked about is a non sequitur.

I didn't say the replication crisis lead to bad incentives. I cited it as evidence bad incentives exist.

> But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars

I didn't say remotely that.

Academics have incentives to make their work sound overly impressive, and many are playing this game. That doesn't mean every grant writer is a pathological liar, but it's very naive to think they aren't incentivised to oversell findings, and many do.