>Don’t hate the player, hate the game

I understand this is a cheeky section heading and the author is not really making this point, but this may be one of the dumbest popular phrases out there. You're effectively saying "Don't get upset at me for being an awful person, I probably wouldn't have succeeded if I'd been a good person." "The game," of course, is made up of players and if no one played that way there would be no game.

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tjwebbnorfolk 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Ok but if you are the first person to decide to be "good" in a rotten game, you aren't going to be held up as some example of virtue. You are just going to lose the game.

Of course the thing that makes the game rotten is incentives. The academic profession as a whole has decided to incentivize and reward this behavior.

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retsibsi 3 days ago | parent [-]

But if winning the game requires you to do shitty science and defraud the public, why play it at all? There's no desperation justification here, because anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job.

	▲	nyeah 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because, for one thing, some people are shitty frauds, and they're not bothered by it. Those people see messed-up incentives as an opportunity. Do serious workers tend to get out of the field, if the incentives are wrongheaded enough? Sure. Some. Does that fix the incentives or the outcomes within that field? No, not at all.
	▲	bpt3 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Because it's not a requirement, and most people are not intentionally or accidentally defrauding the government. The issue is that there is no incentive to do the additional work necessary to generate reproducible results because of the pressure to constantly generate sufficiently novel results to publish. If you spend the additional time required to have fully reproducible results and your competition is not, you're probably going to lose the game (where the game is obtaining more funding). Not generating reproducible results doesn't mean you're a fraud, but the absence of a requirement to generate them in order to publish means that it's easier for fraudsters to operate that it would be with that requirement.
	▲	labcomputer 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job. I suspect the way this usually gets started is similar to embezzlement schemes. “Oh I’ll just borrow a few dollars from the till and pay it back tomorrow” is akin to “The manuscript is due tonight so I’ll just touch up this microphotograph to look like the other one that had bad focus.” That escalates into forging invoices on the one hand and completely fabricated data on the other. By that point they’re in too deep to stop until they get caught.
	▲	tokai 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		>because anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job. That's not obviously true at all.
	▲	tjwebbnorfolk 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Because you've just spent 10-15 years studying for a masters, PhD, and postdoc how to do exactly one thing, and probably are IN that system for another 5-10 years before realizing how totally corrupt it is.

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fullshark 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How about "you get what you incentivize?"

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tbrownaw 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "The game," of course, is made up of players and if no one played that way there would be no game.

You don't have to hate someone in order to, er, apply incentives against whatever it is they just did.

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kjkjadksj 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Look at you. Posting on the internet wasting resources. Probably from a house large enough to house 10x more people in barracks configuration. Eating food from the clearcut forest. Buying tech mined out of pristine wilderness. While people go hungry in your city and sleep unsheltered.

But I don’t hate you for this. None of these terrible moves you make are your fault. Just a reality of the world we live in. Hate the game, not the player.

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retsibsi 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's definitely important to change the game, because there will (sadly) always be a supply of unscrupulous people if dishonesty is rewarded. But I do think the incentive-focused approach sometimes undermines itself. One of the ways to disincentivize dishonesty is to have strong social sanctions against dishonest people, so it's (arguably) pretty stupid to weaken this with a "don't hate the player" attitude. And we tend to work harder to prevent and punish offenses that stir our emotions, so if everyone is blasé about academic dishonesty then we'll probably continue to see lax enforcement and weak penalties.

	▲	anishrverma 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think this is the right tension, in that bad incentives matter, but that does not remove personal responsibility. We probably need both stronger accountability for clear misconduct and better systems that make rigor, transparency, and verification easier to pursue in the first place. The second piece gets much less attention than it should. That is a big part of what we’re trying to tackle at Liberata: https://liberata.info/beta-signup

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convolvatron 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

you're right about the phrase, its basically an assertion that "we're all cheating scum, so I have no choice but to be a cheating scum myself", which is hugely corrosive. and in this case its the funding system more broadly that's imposing these non-goals from above that are incentivizing bad science.

but why are they imposing these structures? to try to weed out the cheating scum. once you start walking down that path, you're signing up for a distortion of value.

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bpt3 3 days ago | parent [-]

As I said to the parent poster, that's not what it means at all. It means that you should look at the system's incentives, not the behavior of individuals as the root cause of any issues.

You don't need to be a "cheating scum" to succeed, but there are not enough checks in place to prevent that from being a successful strategy for someone who wouldn't succeed otherwise.

The people who need to change the most are the nameless "they" who issue funding because they have the most control over these systems, along with the publishing cartel which has almost no redeeming value in today's environment.

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anishrverma 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

[dead]

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zdragnar 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Nobody says the phrase when they are calling people to look at a system's incentives. They use the phrase as a response to personal criticism excusing and rationalizing their own bad behavior.

It is a deflection of personal responsibility, full stop.

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bpt3 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's objectively false, with the article in question being example #1.

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rcxdude 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet changing the game generally has better results than trying to change the players.

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anishrverma 3 days ago | parent [-]

Agreed. Accountability matters, but changing the game usually scales better than hoping for better individual behaviour under the same pressures. Academia needs systems that reward transparency, verification, and contribution more directly. That is part of what we are building with Liberata if of interest: https://liberata.info/beta-signup

	▲	bpt3 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Some unsolicited feedback from someone who was at one point part of your target audience for this product: * You need to put some text on the pages on your site describing what this actually is and who is working on it. No one is taking the time to watch videos (especially one that is 9 minutes long!??!?!?!) * The problems listed don't give me the impression that the team has much experience with publishing in academia and are generally unfocused * Related to the item above, you're both making this way more complicated than it needs to be, and completely ignoring or glossing over the primary issues at hand (the network effect of the existing publisher cartel and the tension between the requirements for obtaining funding and producing reproducible research findings) I don't think you're in a position to have much impact on the major issues, making any impact on the more minor ones kind of irrelevant, but if I'm wrong: I would focus on making it easy for academic communities to start their own open access journals (e.g. the Journal of Machine Learning Research) and provide a tool to automate citation checking to start, with steps towards content management for the content that would allow an external party to reproduce the results from the paper). Recruiting people who can break away from the current model to build a new one is the only real chance of success, and your role would presumably be to make it easy for them to make that change. This is not a novel concept, and many platforms already exist to enable open access journal publication, yet their adoption is not widespread. The question I think you should address on your website (in text form) is: What are you doing differently that will cause a different outcome?

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bpt3 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Don't get upset at me for being an awful person, I probably wouldn't have succeeded if I'd been a good person

That's not what that phrase means in general, and it's normally not used to describe one's own behavior (when it is, I would say your definition is closer to correct because it's being used as an excuse for antisocial behavior).

The point is that the system's incentives are at a minimum misaligned with what would be considered "good" behavior and in the worst case actively encourage undesirable behavior.

It is often the case that people have no meaningful alternative to participating in these systems and have no control over the rules, and the behavior they induce is generally not bad enough to be seen as "awful", let alone bad enough to call the person themselves "awful".