Regarding "undermining" novel innovation, you're right for sure. In this example, however, it's not undermining, I'm alleging they're not even doing compressive sensing, and that a competent unbiased reviewer would have caught it.
Sorry then, I read "hustling" as with intent. It definitely has negative connotation. Since it many times is seen as an act of fraud. Though strictly by definition this could be over zealousness and not malice, but it definitely has that connotation in vernacular use.
From what I saw in academia, it definitely was partial hustling. The thing is that it became so prevalent in some disciplines that the new generation now views this as "research" and not hustling.
Academics are no less immune to social proof. For them, academics is what academics do. And if most of them do this, then this is academics. The notion that it is problematic is waved away.
Do you have any references for these examples?
I did try to give a bunch of side notes to downplay and justify it in ways that may be conceited, but also reasonably human. I don't know if these stories I heard were a single person (I'd be surprised if there weren't at least one person!) or a larger group. I wouldn't be surprised if a ridiculous voice got amplified (can't think of any times that happened in modern times.....)
But the reality is the present incentive system in the "sciences" is such that bullshit, hustling, trend following, sucking up to the associate dean, marketing chops and chasing fashion (to say nothing of politics and witch hunts) are rewarded, and honest diligent research isn't. This is one of the reasons actual breakthroughs (such as deep learning) are incredibly rare in the modern day, compared to, say, the way stuff worked in the 50s.
I'd argue that the more we learn the harder it is to find major breakthroughs. Looking at Math and Physics as a model, I think this is clear, that major breakthroughs become more sparse as time passes. Luckily we have more eyes looking at things now, which helps a lot.
Similarly in technology, there is much to do, but tinkering with hardware, craftsmanship; the things that worked in industrial labs in the old days: they're not done any more. Even making some simple piece of junk aluminum part, people waste time fooling around with solid designer and FEA instead of just handing a piece of graph paper to a former Navy machinist. There are entire books written in the post WW-2 era about fast development when people actually used to develop things quickly. Nobody does it. Well, the Russians and Chinese do, but they also develop big technology a lot faster than we do in the west.
I have no idea what's wrong with machine learning research; probably gratuitous abuse of grad students, people jumping after fashion, and lately brain drain.
EDIT: I also don't buy the dominance of stupidity for another reason: if you're being stupid, you'll make mistakes. But you can't obfuscate and bullshit without intent to do so.
I think we'd agree that there are a large amount of people that do not do great things, momentarily or as a way of being. But how many people see themselves as bad? Very few. You can find tons of psych studies on this. Where people doing evil things justify it for many different reasons. "Just this one time", "for the greater good", "I have no other choice", "because _they_ are cheating", "the system is rigged against me", "fight fire with fire", etc. We all know these things. We've done them ourselves (to some extent or another).
I think a good example is politics. I think a lot of westerners like democracy (vague term). But how many imagine that if we were dictator for a day how we could just fix everything? Besides being naive and overestimating our intellectual prowess, it goes against the fundamental idea of a democracy. I'd argue that a lot of authoritarians see themselves in this way (there's good evidence to support this). That it is for the greater good. I'm sure you can think of at least two examples today that think that they have to control their countries because the people they rule over are not smart/civilized enough to know what is best for themselves.
Is this malice? I think that depends on the perspective. And that's really what Hanlon's Razor is about, perspective. Understanding the mind of the actor.
Relevant XKCD "Fields of Purity" - https://www.xkcd.com/435/
I do think there is a problem that our breadth of knowledge, as humans, is far larger than what one person can understand. There's famous examples of revolutions in science being claimed as mundane results. Topologists said Nash was just applying topology to economics and it was nothing new (to them). Mathematicians saw Einstein's results as unsurprising because of the tensor analysis. (Some of these are over exaggerated and there's definitely a post hoc superiority complex in play). But if we just take this at face value, is any of this bad? I would argue no, because it still takes someone to connect the dots between fields and push studies to think in those ways.
But one thing is for sure, as we gain more knowledge it is more likely that someone else independently discovers something that was already discovered. It is also more likely that some of these are rediscoveries of ideas that were not useful at the time.
I think there is a way to solve this though, but I'm not sure we can (yet). We need some good way to check research in a cross-disciplinary manner. Not only that, but in a highly technical way.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor