PART 1:
>>12977007>even if it is. what's the relevance here?I'm glad someone finally asked. Let me explain: as I said, in my estimation there is some sort of perverse incentive at work, and "perverse incentives" are a game theoretic concept, which is why I bring up game theory (and perverse incentive are also closely related to incentive compatibility, but that is slightly more technical, so I can get into that later, if you'd like).
Now, a perverse incentive is a social norm that is intended to address a particular issue or solve some sort of problem, but due to a lack of knowledge or a failure to appreciate the complexity of the larger social context, the norm actually has a counterproductive effect, or an effective which conflicts with your desired goals.
There are actually many examples of these "perverse incentives" in the history of science, and a lot of them are really interesting. My favorite example involves this guy G H R von Koenigswald, who was apparently an anthropologist in Java, ca. 100 years ago. Now Koenigswald was interested in hominim skulls, so in order to get people to help him, he decided to incentivize the local population by offering a small financial reward if they brought him a skull fragment. The problem here is that by offering money for skull fragments, instead of bringing him more, high quality fossils, the locals actually started to destroy the skulls that they found, so that they would have for skull fragments, and would hence get more money. Of course, Koenigswald did not want people destroying his hominim fossils, but that's what happened.
In other words, Koenigswald wanted to get more, high quality bone fragments, but the social incentive that he put in place was actually counterproductive, and ultimately resulted in FEWER high quality fragments, and more low quality, broken skull fragments. The incentive structure he had in place was counterproductive to his actual goals. Game theorists call this a "perverse incentive".
