That depends on how critical you are. Our current incentive structure is out of control across the board and everything is skewing towards maximizing ROI in about every aspect of life money is involved in.
I apply this perspective to everything I see ("how are they getting money from this?") then work backwards and it seems to lead to accurate predictions, at least anecdotally. Perhaps I'm just jaded and cynical but it works well, unfortunately.
> Perhaps I'm just jaded and cynical but it works well, unfortunately.
It works well for me too.
I've learned to extend the "how are they getting money from this?" question into a generalized, first-principles thinking - look at the incentive structures and think about what they imply, about what's the expected behavior of a system running under those incentives. Because while not everything is about the money, systems will evolve over time along the lines of the incentives contained in them.
I'm arguing that the phenomena seem identical in their underlying structures. In both cases, we're dealing with a situation in which a person faces mountains of evidence that a source (a newspaper, or scientific papers in a given field) keeps pumping out inaccurate or wrong publications, but despite all that evidence, they assume that whatever isn't explicitly pointed out as wrong must be 100% true, accurate and honest.
Ideally, but once you are deep in a field what a field even is becomes murky. You have a biology paper you submit for review, but methodologically it's not really a biology paper, but maybe a statistics paper, or a computer science paper, or a theoretical math paper. Who reviews that paper, the person who knows the biology in question or the methods through and through? Sometimes the only person in the world who knows the theory and the technology in question the best is the author.
I apply this perspective to everything I see ("how are they getting money from this?") then work backwards and it seems to lead to accurate predictions, at least anecdotally. Perhaps I'm just jaded and cynical but it works well, unfortunately.