alt Hacker NewsBenchmaxxing is the default case, and always has been.
It's really, really difficult to avoid it even when you care to stop yourself; and it's not even just a problem in machine learning, it's the standard failure mode of all minds capable of learning, human, animal, artificial.
Even pure genetics has this problem. Viruses and cancers also demonstrate this behaviour, with the bench being evolution's only option: reproductive success.
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You can't justify it being OK just because it's common. Here, this just makes benchmarks into a low signal and useless marketing number once people get numb to all the 99%s.
Also no idea what viruses and cancers have to do with this. Cancer is surely very poor reproductively because they never spread to other hosts.
Why would I adapt myself to unseen environments unnecessarily?