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Comment by chithanh | Hacker News Reader

> Grad students / postdocs / human lab rats aren't scum, the incentives just aren't in place to promote good behavior

The question is, would additional incentives promote good behavior or just lead to more measurement dysfunction. Some people think that just giving the "right" incentives is needed, but actual research shows otherwise.

https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work

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Without reading through that very long text, claiming that incentives don't influence human behavior is a wildly exotic claim.

There is near infinite evidence to the contrary. That said, constructing a system with "the right incentives" can of course be devilishly hard or even impossible.

The claim is that it does change behavior, but only temporarily and it doesn't change the culture in a positive way / doesn't motivate people. It ends up feeling like a way of manipulating. That being said, according to this article, the entire incentive system would need to be dismantled. Simply adding more incentives wouldn't necessarily produce higher quality, at least not in the long run. So essentially the process of incentivizing new amazing research for funding is the primary issue and adding incentives for pointing out issues would just be a bandaid.

This sounds like a good critique of naive incentive schemes.

I don't think there is any doubt that humans follow incentives.

But working out what the core incentive problems are, and actually changing them might be both (1) intellectually difficult, and (2) challenge some sacred beliefs and strong power structures, thus making it practically impossible.

The HBR article's discussion of incentives is not really quite what I was thinking of when I wrote my comment. Specifically, the article you cite refers to the well-known phenomenon of how introducing extrinsic rewards via positive reinforcement is counterproductive in the long run. I've often noticed this form of "incentive" / reward being offered in the gamification of open science, such as via the Mozilla Open Science Badges [0], which in my opinion are a waste of time, effort, and money that do little to address systemic problems with scientific publishing.

With regard to the issue of grad students being unwilling to come forward and report mistakes, incentives wouldn't be added, but rather positive punishment [1] would be removed, which would then allow rewards for intrinsically motivated [2] actions.

[0] https://cos.io/our-services/open-science-badges/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment_(psychology)

[2] https://msu.edu/~dwong/StudentWorkArchive/CEP900F01-RIP/Webb...

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