In some disciplines, like working in an Amazon warehouse, intrinsic motivation is low and both cheating and legitimate but zero sum efforts are unlikely. There, ever greater competition for economic and social rewards generate ever better results. In other domains, like the creation of knowledge and especially the evaluation of knowledge, intrinsic motivation is relatively strong, cheating is easy or likely to succeed or zero sum situations are the default. In those domains, competition leads to the displacement of necessary activities by highly optimized forms of fraud. At the extreme, nobody argues that we need profit maximization by judges or by generals. Unfortunately, using pharmceutical companies to produce medical innovation isn’t very much better and ever more commercialized and competitive academia isn’t much better than that.
Nobody is confused about this. We don’t have incentives this terrible by accident. Rather, there are constituencies in favor of accurate shared information and constituencies against. The latter, unfortunately have been working unopposed for a long time
In some disciplines, like working in an Amazon warehouse, intrinsic motivation is low and both cheating and legitimate but zero sum efforts are unlikely. There, ever greater competition for economic and social rewards generate ever better results. In other domains, like the creation of knowledge and especially the evaluation of knowledge, intrinsic motivation is relatively strong, cheating is easy or likely to succeed or zero sum situations are the default. In those domains, competition leads to the displacement of necessary activities by highly optimized forms of fraud. At the extreme, nobody argues that we need profit maximization by judges or by generals. Unfortunately, using pharmceutical companies to produce medical innovation isn’t very much better and ever more commercialized and competitive academia isn’t much better than that.
Nobody is confused about this. We don’t have incentives this terrible by accident. Rather, there are constituencies in favor of accurate shared information and constituencies against. The latter, unfortunately have been working unopposed for a long time