Tal Yarkoni: No, it's not The Incentives—it's you

Zack_M_Davis

This is a linkpost for https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/

Neuroscientist Tal Yarkoni denounces many of his colleagues' tendency to appeal to publish-or-perish incentives as an excuse for sloppy science (October 2018, ~4600 words). Perhaps read as a complement to our recent discussion of Moral Mazes?

This is a linkpost for https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/

Definitely think this is an important point in the conversation.

I think my take is something like "The incentives are the problem" is a useful frame for how to look at systems and (often but not always) other people, but should throw up a red flag when you use it as an excuse for your own behavior.

I'm not sure I endorse this post precisely as written, because "take ownership of your behavior" is a cause that will be Out To Get You for everything you've got (while leaving you vulnerable to Asymmetric Justice in the meanwhile). There are lots of things you [generic you] probably do or are complicit in, that have a bad effect on other people. If the norm in academia is to use bad statistics, or fake data (I don't know whether it is or not, or how common it is), and I'm an academic, should I be more worried about avoiding that norm, or avoiding eating meat (which personally seems worse to me), or some third thing I do that causes harm?

The things that actually seem workable to me are:

Try to be in the top 50% of the population at morality
In general practice the muscle of defying social norms that push you to do wrong things, and pick at least some areas where you commit to be significantly better than the status quo.
"don't play the game" may not always be an option, but "try to create situations where you *actually* create opportunities stag hunts to succeed." i.e. in this case, maybe try to at least make it true that at your department or university or conference, it is unacceptable to fake or exaggerate data. This is a longterm battle that won't work if you halfass it.

As it happens, the case of speeding also came up in the comments on the OP. Yarkoni writes:

[...] I think the point I'm making actually works well for speeding too: when you get pulled over by a police officer for going 10 over the limit, nobody is going to take you seriously if your objection to the ticket is "but I'm incentivized to go 10 over, because I can get home a little faster, and hardly anyone ever gets pulled over at that speed!" The way we all think about speeding tickets is that, sure, there may be reasons we choose to break the law, but it's... (read more)

9Raemon7y

A few clarifications that seem worth making for posterity: [Epistemic status: none of this was or is anything I'm especially confident in. But I'm relatively meta-confident that if you think the answers here are obvious, you're typical minding on how obvious your particular world/morality-model is] * To be clear, I eat meat, and I devote a lot of effort to improving my honesty, meta-honesty and integrity. I expect the median scientist to be in a fairly different epistemic and agentic position that I am. * There were a couple mistakes that I noticed or had pointed out to me after making the above comment. One of them is discussed here. * For the point I was actually trying to make, a perhaps less (or differently?) distracting example would be: "If I'm a median academic, it's not obvious whether I should try to become more honest* than the median academic, or try to, I dunno, recycle more or something." * *where I think "honesty" is a skill, built out of various sub-skills including social resilience, introspection, etc. * This question might have different answers depending on how dishonest or honest you think the median academic is. * I do not think recycling is very important. [edit: concretely, it is definitely less important than academic honesty by a large margin]. But the world is full of things that might possibly be important for me to do, and figuring out which of them matter and why is hard. I expect the median academic to have put very little thought into their morality. If they think improving their honesty is more important, or improving their recycling is more important, I think this says very little about how good they are at choosing moral principles, and has much more to do with having happened to accidentally bump into a set of friends/family/etc that priorities honesty or recycling or veganism or whatever. * I think the most important thing the median academic should do is become more socially resilient, agenty, and good at

33catherio7y

Here's another further-afield steelman, inspired by blameless postmortem culture. When debriefing / investigating a bad outcome, it's better for participants to expect not to be labeled as "bad people" (implicitly or explicitly) as a result of coming forward with information about choices they made that contributed to the failure. More social pressure against admitting publicly that one is contributing poorly contributes to systematic hiding/obfuscation of information about why people are making those choices (e.g. incentives). And we need all that information to be out in the clear (or at least available to investigators who are committed & empowered to solve the systemic issues), if we are going to have any chance of making lasting changes. In general, I'm curious what Zvi and Ben think about the interaction between "I expect people to yell at me if I say I'm doing this" and promoting/enabling "honest accounting".

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Tal Yarkoni: No, it's not The Incentives—it's you

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Tal Yarkoni: No, it's not The Incentives—it's you

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