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C.F.J. Wu 567works, he wrote of Pearson: “If peevish intolerance of free opinion in others isa sign of senility, it is one which he had developed at an early age” (Fisher,1950). Even the greatest ever statistician could not be more magnanimous.46.3 Looking to the futureIn 2010, I gave a speech (Wu, 2010) whose main motivation was the discomfortingtrend I have witnessed in the last 15–20 years in the US and elsewhere.Compared to back when I started my career, there has been an increasing emphasison the number of papers, journal rankings, citations, and funding. Backthen, a new PhD could secure a tenure-track post in a top department withno paper published or accepted as long as the letters were good and the workin the thesis was considered to have good quality. Not anymore. We now seemost leading candidates in the applicant pool to have several papers in topjournals (and who ranks these journals?) Is this due to inflation or is the newgeneration really smarter or work harder than mine? Admittedly most of thetop departments still judge the candidates by the merits of the work. But thenew and unhealthy emphasis has affected the community by and large.There are some obvious culprits, mostly due to the environment we are in.The funding agencies give preference to large team projects, which require alarge number of papers, patents, etc. The widespread use of internet such asScientific Citation Index (SCI) and Google Scholar has led to instant comparisonsand rankings of researchers. Unfortunately this obsession with numericshas led to several widely used rankings of universities in the world. In manycountries (US being one lucky exception), university administrators pressureresearchers to go for more citations in order to boost their ranking.In the statistical world, some countries list the “Big Four” (i.e., The Annalsof Statistics, Biometrika, theJournal of the American Statistical Associationand the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B) as the mostdesirable journals for promotion and awards. The detrimental impact on thedevelopment of long lasting work is obvious but young researchers can’t affordto work or think long term. Immediate survival is their primary concern.What can be done to mitigate this negative effect? I am not optimisticabout the environment that spawned this trend. The widespread use of theinternet can only exacerbate the trend. I hope that the scientific establishmentand policy makers of countries that aspire to join the league of scientific powerswill soon realize that sheer numbers of papers or citations alone do not leadto major advances and discoveries. They should modify their reward systemsaccordingly.The leading academic departments, being good practitioners, bear a greatresponsibility in convincing the community not to use superficial numeric measures.At the individual level, good education at an early stage can help. Pro-