How do incentives get fixed? Do we have any social systems engineers that focus entirely on designing or adjusting incentives to encourage social systems to organically produce the desired outcomes?
Is there any incentives-first systems thinking going on?
> "When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist." —Barry Schwartz
I'd say you need to reinforce psychological traits in the work environment, like following your curiosity for the sake of it (watch others do it), or feeling guilty about publishing something that you know may mislead the readers (watch your supervisors correct such failures, instead of teaching you how to trick your paper into a high-impact journal). De-emphasize gate-keepers, the quantitative measurements (like citation count), financial pressure to perform. All of those will be gamed if they are too important.
Then build a reputation (as an institution) to work that way, I guess. This will give publications from that institution a higher credibility (long-term). The cost of being mislead by the claims of every paper you read is simply too high.
Quite so. And things may be worse than that. It may be that both incentives and virtues are unreliable. For example, the famous day care study mentioned in Freakonomics casts doubt on the utility of incentives when it comes to social problem-solving:
https://sites.google.com/site/cvhsbahm/economics/econ_calend...
Moreover, my guess is that virtues themselves may also be unreliable because they're are about outward behaviour, which is often inherited and not explicitly understood, and which may not be passed on.
Jacob Bronowski, scientist and author of The Ascent of Man, identified the primary scientific virtue as what he called the habit of truth. This is to rigidly tell the truth about all things, both in private and in print, including about the minutest details, in one's scientific work.
It is a matter of opinion, but it seems that the habit of truth no longer pervades the scientific enterprise, now fully professionalized and bureaucratised.
Perhaps it was lost because it was only a habit. Whereas the love of truth, beauty, and so on, are spiritual values: modes of being rather than habitual outward behaviours. Which may explain why (according to Ed Dutton and Bruce Charlton), many 20th century scientific geniuses were first generation atheists. They inherited a reverence for truth and reality; they were able to make important scientific progress, but their ardour could not be sustained beyond a generation or two.
This is also why we can’t let science evolve into a religion, for what it’s worth. It can’t be the core of human spirituality: it’s too human of an institution.
Technically it mainly casts doubt on monetary forms of incentives. But it also mentions there are other kinds of incentives too.
I think like a lot of major problems, it will require a lot of changes coming from a lot of places.
One massive one, though, in my opinion is serious, significant changes in grant funding processes. There need to be big changes to how grants are awarded and funding decisions are made, and how those grants are actually funded. Moving to more of a lottery-style system (where everything above, say the 50%tile are entered into a lottery), and funding individuals are examples.
I also seriously believe indirect funds need to be cut. In the very least least indirect funds need to be line-item justified, rather than being based on some arbitrary percent cut or however they're negotiated now, with independent audits of the indirect funds to determine whether universities are asking for more than they're actually cost.
Some universities get around the indirect fund incentive structures in creative ways. For example, one place I know of takes all the indirect funds and redirects it toward university-grant support services at the university, so none of it goes into other activities, and it doesn't go to specific departments. But even that seems insufficient.
A lot of this is going to require other things, like trimming administrative bloat, democratizing university decision-making, punishing superficial promotion and tenure criteria, and increasing transparency about why universities are making decisions that they are. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I have no idea what's going to happen. Former federal agency heads have compared it to the pre-2008 financial bubble, and that's what it feels like to me. But how that bubble pops I have no idea. I could see the government coming in and cutting indirect funds; I could see something like indisputable proof of COVID being the result of a lab leak maybe causing a public outcry over what's going on; or I could see people just not going to grad school anymore and things drying up. Or maybe it will just get exponentially worse for awhile.