the bottom 60% or so grift and play status games, but probably weren’t going to contribute much anyway
I disagree with this reasoning. A well-designed system with correct incentives would co-opt these people’s desire to grift and play status games for the purposes of extracting useful work from them. Indeed, setting up game-theoretic environments in which agents with random or harmful goals all end up pointed towards some desired optimization target is largely the purpose of having “systems” at all. (See: how capitalism, at its best, harnesses people’s self-interest towards creating socially valuable things.)
People who would ignore incentives and do quality work anyway would probably do quality work anyway, so if we only cared about them, we wouldn’t need incentive systems at all. (Figuring out who these people are and distributing resources to them is another purpose of such systems, but a badly-designed system is also bad at this task.)
I disagree with this reasoning. A well-designed system with correct incentives would co-opt these people’s desire to grift and play status games for the purposes of extracting useful work from them. Indeed, setting up game-theoretic environments in which agents with random or harmful goals all end up pointed towards some desired optimization target is largely the purpose of having “systems” at all. (See: how capitalism, at its best, harnesses people’s self-interest towards creating socially valuable things.)
People who would ignore incentives and do quality work anyway would probably do quality work anyway, so if we only cared about them, we wouldn’t need incentive systems at all. (Figuring out who these people are and distributing resources to them is another purpose of such systems, but a badly-designed system is also bad at this task.)
well, in academia, if you do quality work anyways and ignore incentives, you’ll get a lot less funding to do that quality work, and possibly perish.
unfortunately, academia is not a sufficiently well designed system to extract useful work out of grifters.
It’s not a perfectly designed system, but it’s still possible to benefit from it if you want a few years to do research.