alt Hacker NewsOk but if you are the first person to decide to be "good" in a rotten game, you aren't going to be held up as some example of virtue. You are just going to lose the game.
Of course the thing that makes the game rotten is incentives. The academic profession as a whole has decided to incentivize and reward this behavior.
But if winning the game requires you to do shitty science and defraud the public, why play it at all? There's no desperation justification here, because anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job.