I keep not learning how corrupt authorship of academic papers is. When I read papers, I imagine all the authors have been working away together in an office somewhere and they all wrote parts of the paper and all read it and all have a feeling of ownership of it and deeply understand the whole thing. But I forget how the only academic paper I ever had published was one that I never read and had no understanding of. All I did was give some technician-like advice to the actual author. It feels dirty and I sometimes regret accepting it but at the same time, the whole science world seems like it doesn't deserve honesty because everyone else is corrupt too.
Not hard to see why. Being an author helps your cv. Allowing you to be an author for tangential or minimal contribs can help keep good relations, especially if there are future options and financial things depending on having good relations. Putting a name on a paper costs nothing and nobody checks how big the contribution was. It's slightly dilutes the subjective authorship fraction of those who did the work, but sometimes the additional person also brings in a nice prestigious affiliation that even has a positive impact on how seriously the paper is taken... It's a game.
