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Incentives are themselves dangerous. We should treat incentives like guns. Instead we apply incentives to all manner of problems and are surprised they backfire

by boxed 2y ago

Incentives are themselves dangerous. We should treat incentives like guns. Instead we apply incentives to all manner of problems and are surprised they backfire and destroy everything. You have to give people less incentives and more just time to do their basic job.

foldr 2y ago
I think this hits the nail on the head. Academics have been treated like assembly line workers for decades now. So they’ve collectively learned how to consistently place assembled product on the conveyor belt. The idea that scientific output is a stack of publications is pretty absurd if you think about it for a few minutes. But try telling that to the MBA types who now run universities.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  You do need to incentivize something. If you incentivize nothing that's the same thing as an institution not existing and science being done purely as a hobby. You can get some distance that way - it's how science used to work - but the moment you want the structure and funding an institution can provide you must set incentives. Otherwise people could literally just stop turning up for work and still get paid, which is obviously not going to be acceptable to whoever is funding it.
  - foldr 2y ago
    I think it’s an interesting feature of current culture that we take it as axiomatic that people need to be ‘incentivized’. I’m not sure I agree. To me that axiom seems to be at the root of a lot of the problems we’re talking about in this thread. (Yes, everyone is subject to incentives in some broad sense, but acknowledging that doesn’t mean that we have to engineer specific incentives as a means to desired outcomes.)
    - krisoft 2y ago
      I think there is some misunderstanding here. Incentives are not some special thing you can opt to not do. Who do you hire to do science? When do you give them a raise? Under which circumstances do you fire them? Who gets a nicer office? There are a bunch of scientist each clamouring for some expensive equipment (not necessarily the same one) who gets their equipment and who doesn't? Scientist wants to travel to a conference, who can travel and where can they travel? We have a bunch of scientist working together who can tell the other what to do and what not to do? Depending on your answers to these questions you set one incentive structure or an other. If you hire and promote scientist based on how nicely they do interpretive dance you will get scientist who dances very well. If you hire and promote scientist based on how articulate they are about their subject matters you will get very well spoken scientist. If you don't hire anybody then you will get approximately nobody doing science (or only independently wealthy dabbling here and there out of boredom.) If you pay a lot to the scientist who do computer stuff, but approximately no money to people who do cell stuff you will get a lot of computer scientist and no cell scientist. Maybe that is what you want, maybe not. These don't happen from one day to an other. You are not going to get more "cancer research" tomorrow out of the existing cancer researchers if you hike their salary 100 fold today. But on the order of decades you will definitely see much much more (or much less) people working on the problem.
      - foldr 2y ago
        I meant to cover that in the last (parenthesized) sentence or my post. There will always be incentives in a broad sense, but it is not necessary to “incentivize” people via official productivity metrics. Academics used to figure out who to promote without creating a rush for everyone to publish as much as possible, or to maximize other gameable metrics. I don’t kid myself that there was ever a golden era of true academic meritocracy, but there really did used to be less of an obsession with silly metrics, and a greater exercise of individual judgment.
  - boxed 2y ago
    Einstein, Darwin, Linneaus. All science as a hobby. I don't think we should discount that people will in fact do it as a hobby if they can and make huge contributions that way.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Einstein spent almost all of his life in academia living off research grants. His miracle year took place at the end of his PhD and he was recruited as a full time professor just a few years later. Yes, he did science as a hobby until that point, but he very much wanted to do it full time and jumped at the chance when he got it. Still, if you want scientific research to be done either as a hobby or a corporate job, that's A-OK. The incentives would be much better aligned. There would certainly be much less of it though, as many fields aren't amenable to hobbyist work at all (anything involving far away travel, full time work or that requires expensive equipment).
      - boxed 2y ago
        > There would certainly be much less of it though I doubt that very much. And making such a statement without any evidence seems... unscientific :P
dkarl 2y ago
> You have to give people less incentives and more just time to do their basic job. That was the idea behind tenure, but then tenure became the incentive. Job security at a socially prestigious job with solid benefits is a huge incentive to fraud even to people who don't care about science, and then for people who do care about doing science and have been directing their entire adult lives towards that end, they face a cataclysmic career bifurcation: either they get a tenured academic research position and spend their lives doing science, or they leave science behind altogether and at best end up doing science-adjacent product development which at best best, if they join a pharmaceutical company or something like that, might sometimes closely resemble scientific research despite being fundamentally different in its goals. Given the dramatic consequences on people's lives, fraud should be expected. Academic research should acknowledge the situation and accept that it needs safeguards against fraud as surely as banks need audits and jewelry stores need burglar alarms.
- nextos 2y ago
  OP here. Perhaps I didn't explain it well, but I think the key is to de-incentivize bad behavior, and to make sure people publishing have some skin in the game. Right now, it's the opposite. The system rewards flashy findings with no rigor. And that's a slippery slope towards result misrepresentation and downright fraud.

by boxed 2y ago

foldr 2y ago

I think this hits the nail on the head. Academics have been treated like assembly line workers for decades now. So they’ve collectively learned how to consistently place assembled product on the conveyor belt. The idea that scientific output is a stack of publications is pretty absurd if you think about it for a few minutes. But try telling that to the MBA types who now run universities.

mike_hearn 2y ago
You do need to incentivize something. If you incentivize nothing that's the same thing as an institution not existing and science being done purely as a hobby. You can get some distance that way - it's how science used to work - but the moment you want the structure and funding an institution can provide you must set incentives. Otherwise people could literally just stop turning up for work and still get paid, which is obviously not going to be acceptable to whoever is funding it.
- foldr 2y ago
  I think it’s an interesting feature of current culture that we take it as axiomatic that people need to be ‘incentivized’. I’m not sure I agree. To me that axiom seems to be at the root of a lot of the problems we’re talking about in this thread. (Yes, everyone is subject to incentives in some broad sense, but acknowledging that doesn’t mean that we have to engineer specific incentives as a means to desired outcomes.)
  - krisoft 2y ago
    I think there is some misunderstanding here. Incentives are not some special thing you can opt to not do. Who do you hire to do science? When do you give them a raise? Under which circumstances do you fire them? Who gets a nicer office? There are a bunch of scientist each clamouring for some expensive equipment (not necessarily the same one) who gets their equipment and who doesn't? Scientist wants to travel to a conference, who can travel and where can they travel? We have a bunch of scientist working together who can tell the other what to do and what not to do? Depending on your answers to these questions you set one incentive structure or an other. If you hire and promote scientist based on how nicely they do interpretive dance you will get scientist who dances very well. If you hire and promote scientist based on how articulate they are about their subject matters you will get very well spoken scientist. If you don't hire anybody then you will get approximately nobody doing science (or only independently wealthy dabbling here and there out of boredom.) If you pay a lot to the scientist who do computer stuff, but approximately no money to people who do cell stuff you will get a lot of computer scientist and no cell scientist. Maybe that is what you want, maybe not. These don't happen from one day to an other. You are not going to get more "cancer research" tomorrow out of the existing cancer researchers if you hike their salary 100 fold today. But on the order of decades you will definitely see much much more (or much less) people working on the problem.
    - foldr 2y ago
      I meant to cover that in the last (parenthesized) sentence or my post. There will always be incentives in a broad sense, but it is not necessary to “incentivize” people via official productivity metrics. Academics used to figure out who to promote without creating a rush for everyone to publish as much as possible, or to maximize other gameable metrics. I don’t kid myself that there was ever a golden era of true academic meritocracy, but there really did used to be less of an obsession with silly metrics, and a greater exercise of individual judgment.
- boxed 2y ago
  Einstein, Darwin, Linneaus. All science as a hobby. I don't think we should discount that people will in fact do it as a hobby if they can and make huge contributions that way.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Einstein spent almost all of his life in academia living off research grants. His miracle year took place at the end of his PhD and he was recruited as a full time professor just a few years later. Yes, he did science as a hobby until that point, but he very much wanted to do it full time and jumped at the chance when he got it. Still, if you want scientific research to be done either as a hobby or a corporate job, that's A-OK. The incentives would be much better aligned. There would certainly be much less of it though, as many fields aren't amenable to hobbyist work at all (anything involving far away travel, full time work or that requires expensive equipment).
    - boxed 2y ago
      > There would certainly be much less of it though I doubt that very much. And making such a statement without any evidence seems... unscientific :P

dkarl 2y ago

> You have to give people less incentives and more just time to do their basic job. That was the idea behind tenure, but then tenure became the incentive. Job security at a socially prestigious job with solid benefits is a huge incentive to fraud even to people who don't care about science, and then for people who do care about doing science and have been directing their entire adult lives towards that end, they face a cataclysmic career bifurcation: either they get a tenured academic research position and spend their lives doing science, or they leave science behind altogether and at best end up doing science-adjacent product development which at best best, if they join a pharmaceutical company or something like that, might sometimes closely resemble scientific research despite being fundamentally different in its goals. Given the dramatic consequences on people's lives, fraud should be expected. Academic research should acknowledge the situation and accept that it needs safeguards against fraud as surely as banks need audits and jewelry stores need burglar alarms.

nextos 2y ago
OP here. Perhaps I didn't explain it well, but I think the key is to de-incentivize bad behavior, and to make sure people publishing have some skin in the game. Right now, it's the opposite. The system rewards flashy findings with no rigor. And that's a slippery slope towards result misrepresentation and downright fraud.