Negative incentives in academic research
Man, I wish I could use my real name for this reply, but for political reasons I can&#x27;t (in fact, I change my username regularly) because I have a lot of insight into this problem, why it exists, and why it probably won&#x27;t get better barring a complete overhaul of our socioeconomic system and the myriad corrupt institutions that support it.<p>We live in an age of institutional decline and it is severe. You see this in (trade) publishing. Your publisher no longer builds your reputation; the publisher has pushed that responsibility unto the author. The ones who already have the personal resources necessary to market their books get further validation and credibility; the ones who don&#x27;t will go unheard. Academia&#x27;s the same way: universities no longer provide funding for people of excellence; rather, they have put the onus of funding on the professors themselves--you&#x27;ll get more funding (and published in better places) on account of using their name, and for that they take a cut. The relationship has inverted; rather than nurturing emerging talent, these institutions <i>are nurtured by</i> emerging talent, and this vampirism is sustainable because those talented people have no other choice insofar as all the other institutions are failing at approximately the same right.<p>Consequently, we have widespread duplicated effort, channel-flooding due to metrics-gaming (gotta get that h-index into the three digits before tenure time) and a corporatized, mediocre culture in which agreeability (negatively correlated with excellence and conscientiousness) matters far too much and salesmen run the day.<p>Historically, there were nations of priests and nations of warriors and nations of farmers. We&#x27;ve become a nation of sellers; but we no longer have much to sell but our own talk.<p>I don&#x27;t know, for sure, how to solve this. Anyone who pays attention can see that capitalism (which invariably becomes corporate capitalism) is a dead end at a 21st-century technology level... but of course the eradication of capital is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for scientific excellence. Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this, but alone does not guarantee much--there are a lot of cultural changes that probably need to happen before we can build healthy institutions again.