Yeah, and there are Ignoble prizes as well. First, what a lot of those are are teaching devices used to hold new students’ attention while teaching the process. They are also ways to just blow off steam. Research can be high stakes and in some ways it’s like a football team dressing up like cheerleaders.
As you now allow, there can also be reasons behind the various funny papers that the research was actually important and those may not be reported in the papers that get popularized for being frivolous. Those results would be in serious papers published elsewhere.
ChatGPT be damned. Read the actual papers instead of the output from AI trained on X, meta, and the greater internet. When you start asking AI serious questions you better be able to tell what is junk from what is real. I’m not denying those papers exist but a google search is more appropriate.
When I was in grad school and doing my own research, we did all sorts of other kinds of crazy things just on hunches or even just playing around. Sometimes we were in the lab all night working on stuff or waiting for things to be ready or finish. What do you do while babysitting an experiment for hours? I don’t know the conditions or how much time or money might have been wasted, but I can assure you few research directors/professors would endorse or tolerate a bunch of BS results coming out of their lab. Again, wasn’t there but I’d bet little time or money was wasted.
Researchers are under pressure to produce. A professor I considered a friend was denied tenure because he spent more time teaching his students. You don’t produce research that gets published in the prestigious journals and you don’t get research money. You don’t get tenure. And in some places you just get fired. It’s not unlike many other professions. There’s even a catchy idiom - “publish or perish” and trust me, at a review if there isn’t worthy work in your portfolio, you perish.
Like so much other stuff these “anecdotes” and stories are taken out of context and twisted into derogatory indictments of science and scientists. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. And I’m tired of it.