> Re: think tanks, isn't it something that even in supposedly less rigorous fields like, oh English literature, such upfront results-orientation would be considered the badge of unserious scholarship?
Nowhere near as fishy as how think tanks work, but how scientists and academics think about hypotheses is actually very complex and you'd be surprised at how often unserious scholarship is tolerated.
E.g. it's not uncommon to first write a paper and then tag on a hypothesis that just happens to agree with your conclusion, to change the hypothesis when your own research proves it to be wrong (it's hard to get research published about things that didn't work), or to try everything you can to prove a hypothesis, rather than to try and falsify it.
Surely you would need further experimentation to prove your new hypothesis, right? It doesn't seem very rigorous to just shrug your shoulders and publish a hypothesis that fits the data.
Nowhere near as fishy as how think tanks work, but how scientists and academics think about hypotheses is actually very complex and you'd be surprised at how often unserious scholarship is tolerated.
E.g. it's not uncommon to first write a paper and then tag on a hypothesis that just happens to agree with your conclusion, to change the hypothesis when your own research proves it to be wrong (it's hard to get research published about things that didn't work), or to try everything you can to prove a hypothesis, rather than to try and falsify it.