I hear this a lot, and as a PhD student I definitely see some adverse incentives, but I basically just ignore them and do what I want. Maybe I’ll eventually get kicked out of the academic system, but it will take years, which is enough time to do obviously excellent work if I have that potential. Obviously excellent work seems to be sufficient to stay in academia. So the problem doesnt really seem that bad to me—the bottom 60% or so grift and play status games, but probably weren’t going to contribute much anyway, and the top 40% occasionally wastes time on status games because of the culture or because they have that type of personality, but often doesnt really need to.
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.)
In my experience with magh, to be obviously excellent you need to be more like top 10 % of all grad students, possibly even higher, but might vary a lot on the field.
I hear this a lot, and as a PhD student I definitely see some adverse incentives, but I basically just ignore them and do what I want. Maybe I’ll eventually get kicked out of the academic system, but it will take years, which is enough time to do obviously excellent work if I have that potential. Obviously excellent work seems to be sufficient to stay in academia. So the problem doesnt really seem that bad to me—the bottom 60% or so grift and play status games, but probably weren’t going to contribute much anyway, and the top 40% occasionally wastes time on status games because of the culture or because they have that type of personality, but often doesnt really need to.
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.
In my experience with magh, to be obviously excellent you need to be more like top 10 % of all grad students, possibly even higher, but might vary a lot on the field.