The Natural Selection of Bad Science

That's the title of a new paper by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath which presents a sort of agent-based model that reproduces the growth in the publication of junk science that we've seen in recent decades. Even before looking at this paper I was positively disposed toward it for two reasons. First because I do think there are incentives that encourage scientists to follow the forking paths toward statistical significance and that encourage journalists to publish this sort of thing. And I also see incentives for scientists and journals (and even the Harvard University public relations office; see the P.P.S. here) to simply refuse to even consider the possibility that published results are spurious. The second reason I liked this paper before even reading it is that the second author recently wrote an excellent textbook on Bayesian statistics which in fact I just happened to recommend to a student a few hours ago.