If you intervened on ~100 entering PhD students and made them committed to always not following the incentives where they are bad, I predict that < 10% of them will become professors—maybe an expected 2 of them would.
And how many if you didn’t intervene?
So you can’t say “why don’t the academics just not follow the incentives”; any such person wouldn’t have made it into academia.
How do you reconcile this with the immediately prior sentence?
Significantly more, maybe 20. To do a proper estimate I’d need to know which field we’re considering, what the base rates are, etc. The thing I should have said was that I expect it makes it ~10x less likely that you become a professor; that seems more robust to the choice of field and isn’t conditional on base rates that I don’t know.
The Internet suggests a base rate of 3-5%, which means without intervention 3-5 of them would become professors; if that’s true I would say that with intervention an expected 0.4 of them would become professors.
How do you reconcile this with the immediately prior sentence?
I didn’t mean that it was literally impossible for a person who doesn’t follow the incentives to get into academia, I meant that it was much less likely. I do in fact know people in academia who I think are reasonably good at not following bad incentives.
And how many if you didn’t intervene?
How do you reconcile this with the immediately prior sentence?
Significantly more, maybe 20. To do a proper estimate I’d need to know which field we’re considering, what the base rates are, etc. The thing I should have said was that I expect it makes it ~10x less likely that you become a professor; that seems more robust to the choice of field and isn’t conditional on base rates that I don’t know.
The Internet suggests a base rate of 3-5%, which means without intervention 3-5 of them would become professors; if that’s true I would say that with intervention an expected 0.4 of them would become professors.
I didn’t mean that it was literally impossible for a person who doesn’t follow the incentives to get into academia, I meant that it was much less likely. I do in fact know people in academia who I think are reasonably good at not following bad incentives.