[throwawayjava]

> would it be fair to say that impact factor is very like sexual selection for extreme display traits that otherwise are detrimental to the wellbeing of the species?

If I read every PoS article vaguely related to my research, I'd never get anything done. In practice, I don't pay attention to impact factor. But I do pay attention to who's publishing. And that's basically the same as impact factor, in practice.

> that it is a lousy measure of what is likely to end up being true, reproducible and useful.

I don't think so.

High impact factor publications are MUCH more likely to be quality science than low impact factor publications (at least in my area).

The major venues would have to get at least two orders of magnitude worse before they became bad indicators of quality.

Of course, and obviously, that does not entail that all work published in high impact factor journals is high-quality.

I think the fundamental problem is just that you vastly under-estimate the enormous volume of utter crap there is out there.