I have thought about a problem related to this very often. There was an Amazon shareholders letter written by Jeff Bezos that elaborates on their culture of high standards. In particular, it talks about the cost of high standards when writing Amazon's "six-page memos." The idea of having teams with high standards on their written memos resonated with me, but I have not been able to apply it that much in my professional career.
My standards are higher than those of the organization around me, and when it came down to spending the relationship capital to criticize people't documents to the level I felt would make them really high-quality, I just can't do it. Some documents achieve the standard already, so it's not unachievable in general. What it really is is that to provide criticism that feels specific and kind, it feels like I would have to understand the underlying issue at the depth that I want that person to explain to me.
Basically, to get to that level of quality, I have to put in a large fraction of the effort of drafting the document, which I don't have time to do. In some cases, I can point out areas that I feel could offer more elaboration, but sometimes the document feels inadequate and I can't explain why without several hours of concentrated effort.
I feel the same issue could come up here. You can tell a really high quality post because it offers insights that are brilliant but unexpected, or it uncovers primary source data that is neglected and unknown, or it's just a really compelling written explanation. But explaining how to create that out of an average post feels like it requires me to become the expert I want the author to be.
Why do you think people don't already do this?
They have to do it to some extent, otherwise replicability would be literally uncorrelated with publishability, which probably isn't the case. But because of the outcomes, we can see that people aren't doing it enough at the margin, so encouraging people to move as far in that direction as they can seems like a useful reminder.
There are two models here, one is that everyone is a homo economicus when citing papers, so no amount of persuasion is going to adjust people's citations. They are already making the optimal tradeoff based on their utility function of their personal interests vs. society's interests. The other is that people are subject to biases and blind spots, or just haven't even really considered whether they have the OPTION of not citing something that is questionable, in which case reminding them is a useful affordance.
I'm trying to be charitable to the author here, to recover useful advice. They didn't say things in the way I'm saying them. But they may have been pointing in a useful direction, and I'm trying to steelman that.
"the predators are running wild" does not mean "most people are acting in good faith, but are not competent enough for good faith to be a useful assumption".
Even upon careful rereading of that sentence, I disagree. But to parse this out based on this little sentence is too pointless for me. Like I said, I'm trying to focus on finding useful substance, not nitpicking the author, or you!
This problem seems to me to have the flavor of Moloch and/or inadequate equilibria. Your criticisms have two parts, the pre-edit part based on your personal experience, in which you state why the personal actions they recommend are actually not possible because of the inadequate equilibria (i.e. because of academic incentives), and the criticism of the author's proposed non-personal actions, which you say is just based on intuition.
I think the author would be unsurprised that the personal actions are not reasonable. They have already said this problem requires government intervention, basically to resolve the incentive problem. But maybe at the margin you can take some of the actions that the author refers to in the personal actions. If a paper is on the cusp of "needing to be cited" but you think it won't replicate, take that into account! Or if reviewing a paper, at least take into account the probability of replication in your decision.
I think you are maybe reading the author's claim to "stop assuming good faith" too literally. In the subsequent sentence they are basically refining that to the idea that most people are acting in good faith, but are not competent enough for good faith to be a useful assumption, which seems reasonable to me.
Typo: "Systemic reviews" should read "systematic reviews".
The article about this on Strengtheory has links to sources (not as footnotes, in the text). May be useful to check out.
When it comes to problems that are primarily related to motivation, the cost-benefit is so far weighted that the cost of implementing the plan probably doesn't seem relevant to consider, but this is a good point.
I like the idea of using Murphyjitsu for modeling shorter iterations, that's probably generally applicable.
That seems mostly about the emotional content of a particular plan, while I see Murphyjitsu as a tool for avoiding the planning fallacy, forcing yourself to fully think through the implications of a plan, or getting more realistic predictions from System 1. I haven't viewed it much as an emotional tool, but maybe other people do find it useful for that.
Whew, glad I didn't invest more time in this. Seems there is lurking complexity everywhere.
At this price point this seems potentially doable. Some ideas in the order I'd try them:
This is a pretty fun format. Actually, I really like this gomboc idea and briefly considered doing a Kickstarter on it after reading your post. But then I realized that Kickstarter would only really make sense if everyone were willing to pay $800. The market is so niche, that it would have to be a passion project to be worth the hassle I think.
My guess is head, painting photograph.
First (Head): Lacks the level of detail of the other two examples. A painting would also possibly be drawn from a reference, although I have no idea what even the style of painting you were referencing. The major distinction here is that the cheeks in the the second (painting) photo have mottling that suggests to me a better reference. The proportions also seem just a bit more exaggerated to me than the other two. The neck of the first one seems larger, and the shoulders have some asymmetry which is hard to interpret. It looks a bit as if her left shoulder is closer, but that doesn't exactly fit with the posture of her face.
Second (Painting): Basically by comparison with the others. It feels intermediate in realisticness.
Third (photograph): This seems like the photograph to me because it captures more detail than I would hold in my mind's eye, unlike the other two. In particular, crisp laugh lines and the detailed contrast of the eyes makes it feel like it had the most real-world reference. There is also the detail of the clothing, and I feel like most people wouldn't draw that if they were drawing a face from their imagination. (That's actually an argument for the first being painting and the second being head, though).