[ianbooker]

There are many concepts called stepwise regression, its so weird that statistics, as a field, are so bad in delineating concepts.

I teach my students what you see in most social science papers, and in the light of the article at hand, I would call it "stepwise presentation of multivariate regression".

When it comes to the task of explaning, I think presenting different models, with a discussion what your pick is, provides good value to readers.

That said, I agree to the sentiment of the article but not the wording. "Blind" or manipulative stepwise deletion will decrease falsifiability of your work. That should be more provocative to scientists than evil.