The former is a statement about outcomes while the latter is a statement about intentions.
My model for how most academics end up following bad incentives is that they pick up the incentivized bad behaviors via imitation. Anyone who doesn’t do this ends up doing poorly and won’t make it in academia (and in any case such people are rare, imitation is the norm for humans in general). As part of imitation, people come up with explanations for why the behavior is necessary and good for them to do. (And this is also usually the right thing to do; if you are imitating a good behavior, it makes sense to figure out why it is good, so that you can use that underlying explanation to reason about what other behaviors are good.)
I think that I personally am engaging in bad behaviors because I incorrectly expect that they are necessary for some goal (e.g. publishing papers to build academic credibility). I just can’t tell which ones really are necessary and which ones aren’t.
Agreed that it’s related, and I do think it’s part of the explanation.
I will go even further: while in that post the selection happens at the level of properties of individuals who participate in some culture, I’m claiming that the selection happens at the higher level of norms of behavior in the culture, because most people are imitating the rest of the culture.
This requires even fewer misaligned individuals. Under the model where you select on individuals, you would still need a fairly large number of people to have the property of interest—if only 1% of salesmen had the personality traits leading to them being scammy and the other 99% were usually honest about the product, the scammy salesmen probably wouldn’t be able to capture all of the sales jobs. However, if most people imitate, then those 1% of salesmen will slowly push the norms towards being more scammy over generations, and you’d end up in the equilibrium where nearly every salesman is scammy.
Come to think of it, I think I would estimate that ~1% of academics are explicitly thinking about how to further their own career at the cost of science (in ways that are different from imitation).
Isn’t “academics who don’t follow bad incentives almost never become professors” blatantly incompatible with “these are well-intentioned mistakes”?
The former is a statement about outcomes while the latter is a statement about intentions.
My model for how most academics end up following bad incentives is that they pick up the incentivized bad behaviors via imitation. Anyone who doesn’t do this ends up doing poorly and won’t make it in academia (and in any case such people are rare, imitation is the norm for humans in general). As part of imitation, people come up with explanations for why the behavior is necessary and good for them to do. (And this is also usually the right thing to do; if you are imitating a good behavior, it makes sense to figure out why it is good, so that you can use that underlying explanation to reason about what other behaviors are good.)
I think that I personally am engaging in bad behaviors because I incorrectly expect that they are necessary for some goal (e.g. publishing papers to build academic credibility). I just can’t tell which ones really are necessary and which ones aren’t.
This seems related to the ideas in this post on unconscious economies.
Agreed that it’s related, and I do think it’s part of the explanation.
I will go even further: while in that post the selection happens at the level of properties of individuals who participate in some culture, I’m claiming that the selection happens at the higher level of norms of behavior in the culture, because most people are imitating the rest of the culture.
This requires even fewer misaligned individuals. Under the model where you select on individuals, you would still need a fairly large number of people to have the property of interest—if only 1% of salesmen had the personality traits leading to them being scammy and the other 99% were usually honest about the product, the scammy salesmen probably wouldn’t be able to capture all of the sales jobs. However, if most people imitate, then those 1% of salesmen will slowly push the norms towards being more scammy over generations, and you’d end up in the equilibrium where nearly every salesman is scammy.
Come to think of it, I think I would estimate that ~1% of academics are explicitly thinking about how to further their own career at the cost of science (in ways that are different from imitation).