I would say it is worth considering whether correlation (i.e. writing “con” opinions on polywater correlates with lower citations and earnings later) is really causation in this case. (If this is addressed in the larger study, my apologies – this is just looking at the abstract.)

If you have the time to write papers opposing polywater, doesn’t this mean less time devoted to your own research? Could it mean your own research career is stalling? Or that you are more interested in getting your name out there rather than producing meaningful results of your own? If you are too busy with your own pressing research, are you really going to take time out to write against what seems to you to be an obvious scientific dead-end?

Engaging contrarian views may be unproductive. Or it may signal an underlying lack of productivity in the rest of one’s work.

Interesting study and fantastic blog.

Zac, yes, I had in mind contrarian views that die out.

Nevertheless, I’ve written critical papers (as have most other people, it seems). One just tries to squeeze in some interesting ideas or results, which are somewhat independent of the viability of the model being criticized.

Also, this study is looking at a theory that failed ex post, to see the effect on researcher outcomes. We need to do a different analysis if we want to see whether non-mainstream theories are worth debating ex ante, which is what matters for determining our future behavior towards new theories.

Ideally we could classify all papers as falling under mainstream or non-mainstream (at the time of publication), and then look at the outcomes of researchers who respond to each in kind. Obviously some mainstream views become discredited, and some non-mainstream views eventually become the mainstream, so it is not clear that writing about currently-mainstream views is necessarily better.