It&#x27;s not fair to twist people&#x27;s words like that.  If the poster meant churning out papers by &quot;good work&quot; then the whole post would not make sense.  A much more reasonable interpretation would be &quot;in order to produce good papers, or things that are less rewarded (e.g. books), one needs to play the academic game in the meantime and churn out mediocre&#x2F;bad papers&quot;.<p>The main issue as I see it is not that good papers are not rewarded, but rather that bad&#x2F;mediocre papers are rewarded far more than they deserve.  This means that the incentive to work hard on a breakthrough is diminished.