Blame the system not the person => person skates => bad but not catastrophic.

Blame the person not the system => system skates => catastrophic.

If you want to punish wrongdoers on your own time, great, we have no quarrel. Ideally we would blame both, but 80% of the time when someone is advocating blaming the person I find that they have a conflict of interest and secretly want to preserve the system. "Small town morality" sounds good but does not scale and this combination of facts is easily exploited to divert attention away from important system maintenance. There was a time when I felt obliged to extend the benefit of the doubt on this matter but after having said benefit exploited very intentionally on two different occasions I now consider it a bad policy, so: first we worry about fixing the system. That is not negotiable.

yes, and maybe? I think it's important to hold the tension that you are doing something that is both good and harmful (like both building a really nice chat app you give away for free and using the network effects of that app to collect everyone's data and influence them, or protecting people from fraud but also improving the bottom line of Wall Street banks that are contributing to the increasing financialization of everything).

I think acknowledging incentive structures is alright, but ending the process there and not leaning into understanding and manipulating them is the real issue.

The "I'm just doing my job" excuse goes a long way with people. Every once in a while you'll hear about someone who just couldn't stomach it anymore. Working in megacorp finance for example. Or insurance, where there are plenty of unkind incentives. Doesn't happen very often though. For the most part people have a job to do and they do it.

Yes and yes.

I agree with you. It's the law of large numbers; individuals make free choices, yet in the aggregate the incentives make the likelihood of decisions fairly predictable. This is the essence of "nudging" and decision architecture (and dark patterns, etc.).

Its funny, the whole presenting ones self as an objective beacon of morality is a response to an incentive system in itself. For whatever reason; parents, school the author was convinced that this type of morality would yield a better life or piece of mind or some optimal outcome.

In systems that quickly filter out most people (like Academia) the incentive structure is even more selective.

So maybe it’s how limited the resources are (limited grants, limited tenure positions) more so than the incentives.

We can't just say it's the incentives. Morality is always a choice. What people who make amoral or immoral choices skate on is that their morality will not be exposed or questioned publicly or privately. We afford this to all because it's impolite to question someone's morality, extremely rude. You don't know what they've been through and you don't know what their life circumstances are. This is what puts us in this scenario where no one's morality can be called out in situations where there is obviously a moral dilemma. It's not an easy answer, but the only solution to this is courage. You will not make friends doing this so really only people who have "made it" or just straight DGAF will take up this sword.

I remember in college just about every student was sharing exams and cheating. I just didn't do it, and I got shittier grades. Life is full of a lot of people like this, no pun intended, it's demoralizing. I wonder if it's polite to say that to others, just a "hey you are literally demoralizing me, it's toxic".

Shame, or its avoidance, is an incentive.

When researchers become shameless cheats science suffers.

The depressing conclusion is that we need to change the incentives to work in a world without shame. This may work to some extent, but the result will certainly be worse than a world in which most researchers try to do the right thing.

People try to maximize the good and minimize the bad consequences of their actions. They might not do it using utils or with actual quantification but they are doing it. And definitionally, there's no way to get rid of an incentive to defect, because getting rid of it creates a new incentive to defect in a different way. Like, for the purposes of talking about this article, "incentive" could be shorthand for "any reason you could come up with to do something wrong to get ahead" but it could also more broadly be defined as "the expected good results of a choice". As an example, as long as money is important in society, there is always going to exist an "incentive" to rob a bank. That can't be removed. What we can do is make it harder to rob a bank, and force reputational damage and jail to thieves. Creating a society where money doesn't matter might be possible, but then there'd be no bank. By the same token, there will always be an incentive to fake data. We can make it harder to fake data and force reputational damage to people who fake data, but that incentive to fake will exist. The only way that it wouldn't exist would be if we made it so that the outcomes of research didn't matter at all, but it would be hard to imagine a society functioning where any research would be happening if no outcomes mattered. If that were the case, then high school dropouts would try to get research grants for baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. The only way to prevent that would be to create a system where people have to justify their research without caring about the results, but then you've reintroduced "incentives", just different ones that can still be cheated again.

By arguing that it's the moral character of people that's the problem and not the mere incentives, one key disincentive is reintroduced which is the reputational damage thing I alluded to earlier. Most people don't rob banks not because there's no incentive, but because the disincentive (jail, reputational damage) is so high as to make that course of action seem stupid. But if you argue that it's incentives and not moral character to blame, you remove the disincentive of making defectors suffer reputational damage. You can't remove an incentive entirely. You can only change them, and add disincentives. Reputational harm is one of those disincentives, and so is forcing things like pre-registering experiments, open access journals, etc.

No, it's people being unwilling to accept agency and own up to their faults. If we're evaluating a system of rules and how to improve them, trying to understand perverse incentives is important. But it is not an excuse for any individual who violates moral standards to do so because they had an incentive.

I suggest reading The Selfish Gene. A system where only the selfish can thrive is shown to collapse with certainty, no matter how many times one runs the experiment.

And, even moreso for the short term.

If the scientist in question doesn't get found out for 30 years but then becomes a pariah, it doesn't matter. They displaced a better scientist for their entire career. There is no retroactively fixing that.

There is a huge incentive to cough up something that will make you "famous". If it doesn't make you famous, well, you can bury it and simply be a pedestrian scientist--no harm, no foul. If it does make you "famous", well, you might make it out the other side without anybody being able to pin anything decisive on you. And, if you get caught and become a pariah in 10 years, well, you likely earned way more than you would have in 30 years anyway.

Lying, in this case, almost always comes out ahead.

The world is sinful on many levels there is a lot to change. It is hard to exist in a way that doesn't fuck someone over. If you live in the global west and participate in modern life then you are in some area definitely following a perverse inventive.

For example do you live in a building? Do you heat it? There you go. You should be in a tent. Climate change.

Have an SP500 index fund? Investing in weapons and other dystopia. Generally support globalization, regulatory capture, lobbying, bad work conditions and tax evasion over supporting small business.

Vote for one of the 2 main parties? Well done both support genocide. Protest vote? Oh then you voted for Trump in this system well done! The only moral thing is to change the constitution (fwiw) for proportional representation.

Send your kids to a good school?

The list doesn't end.

How do we fix that? Perhaps it can't be done democratically, and you just need someone to come into a high position of power who is willing to be dramatic and disruptive?

I enjoyed reading the book "punished by rewards" that warned us that we often confuse rewards with activities if we are rewarded for doing the activity.

Think about sports. People play to win, when we really should be playing to play.

It may be "me", but I have to remind my self to play as well as I can and not think about win/loss

Avoiding shame is an incentive.

It boils down to: "Why are people violating these unenforced rules? Sure it benefits them, but don't they feel bad?"

Yes, to a gross approximation, scientists cannot and do not advance their career by giving a negative result. That is just how it is, anyone who’s tried being a scientist for a day realizes this.

In ML for example, if you try some weird idea, and it does not beat baseline methods on any specific benchmark, then your paper 9.99/10 will not get accepted. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen a negative result paper ever get accepted into a good ML conference. At the very least, the authors make up their own benchmark and claim their method is best in their own benchmark, and the reviewers then quibble about whether such a benchmark is relevant, and then after back and forth, they come to a decision and decide to accept the paper or not.

Yes exactly Charlie has been saying again and again to not underestimate the power of incentives. I’m a big fan of Tal Yarkoni but I think this article is probably not correct.