AFAICT this is not about profit in a commercial sense, as in selling goods.
It's more like overfitting the target function of publishing impactful research. A bit of p-hacking, a bit of cutting corners in experimental setup, a sloppy null hypothesis check, and you honestly believe you see an effect! Everyone is happy: you, your adviser, lab's administration, the journal where you publish the paper.
But if you carefully check for everything, then find no effect, you kill an interesting hypothesis, your paper is hard to publish, "you are not making progress", and nobody is happy.
Crooked incentives, crooked results :(
It's more like overfitting the target function of publishing impactful research. A bit of p-hacking, a bit of cutting corners in experimental setup, a sloppy null hypothesis check, and you honestly believe you see an effect! Everyone is happy: you, your adviser, lab's administration, the journal where you publish the paper.
But if you carefully check for everything, then find no effect, you kill an interesting hypothesis, your paper is hard to publish, "you are not making progress", and nobody is happy.
Crooked incentives, crooked results :(