when you have people who know better doing something cargo-cult-like
Like Feynman’s description of cargo-cult science? I suspect it’s mostly the result of a particular set of incentives which are structured to reward the cargo-cult visible manifestations and ignore actual work.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. I think lots of people (the students, for example) don’t actually know better. But among those who do, yeah, I would say that the incentives are the cause of the object-level behaviour where they’re not doing real science, and the pattern-botching is the mental process where they don’t notice that they’re not doing real science.
Like Feynman’s description of cargo-cult science? I suspect it’s mostly the result of a particular set of incentives which are structured to reward the cargo-cult visible manifestations and ignore actual work.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. I think lots of people (the students, for example) don’t actually know better. But among those who do, yeah, I would say that the incentives are the cause of the object-level behaviour where they’re not doing real science, and the pattern-botching is the mental process where they don’t notice that they’re not doing real science.