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"In other words, Barack Obama and his franchise are emulating the Clinton’s, and are speaking not to voters, but to potential post-election patrons. That’s what their policy goals are organized around. So when you hear someone talking about how politicians just want to be reelected, roll your eyes. "
"How does publication pressure in modern-day universities affect the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in science? By using a worldwide survey among demographers in developed and developing countries, the authors show that the large majority perceive the publication pressure as high, but more so in Anglo-Saxon countries and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. However, scholars see both the pros (upward mobility) and cons (excessive publication and uncitedness, neglect of policy issues, etc.) of the so-called publish-or-perish culture. By measuring behavior in terms of reading and publishing, and perceived extrinsic rewards and stated intrinsic rewards of practicing science, it turns out that publication pressure negatively affects the orientation of demographers towards policy and knowledge sharing. There are no signs that the pressure affects reading and publishing outside the core discipline."
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The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task.
"Ms. Bradford, of Science magazine, agreed. “I would agree that a scientist’s career advancement should not depend solely on the publications listed on his or her C.V.,” she said, “and that there is much room for improvement in how scientific talent in all its diversity can be nurtured.”
Even scientists who are sympathetic to the idea of fundamental change are skeptical that it will happen any time soon. “I don’t think they have much chance of changing what they’re talking about,” said Dr. Korn, of Harvard. "
"OSF is an open collaboration of scientists to increase the alignment between scientific values and scientific practices. Efforts include development of tools and infrastructure, and conducting research about scientific practices. Infrastructure and tool projects include tools to improve and document scientific workflow and defining Replication Value of existing findings. Research projects include the Reproducibility Project evaluating the replicability of published psychological science, and a survey of opinions about disclosure standards in scientific reportin"
"Reproducibility is supposedly a basic tenet of science, but a number of fields have raised concerns that modern publishing pressures inhibit replication of experiments. In a well-known 2005 PLoS Medicine essay, epidemiologist John Ioannidis, now at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, argued that in biomedicine, many if not most published research claims are false. He outlined a number of factors—including small sample sizes, small effect sizes, and “flexibility” in the research process—that contribute to a high rate of false positives. One reason those false positives aren't caught is because of a lack of emphasis on replication studies, which is “standard across fields of science,” says Columbia University statistician Victoria Stodden, who studies reproducibility and openness in computational science. "
commentary by William Cronon
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One of the paradoxes of history is that no other academic discipline has done a better job of retaining a large public audience—even though many nonhistorians find most academic history boring in the extreme. If one takes as rough-and-ready measures of public interest the allocation of topics among History Channel programs, museum exhibitions that draw large crowds, or books that make it onto best-seller lists, the distribution of subjects they cover is generally quite different from specialties represented by the faculties of history departments at most colleges and universities. When one also acknowledges that many of history's most popular interpreters lack graduate training in the subject—think here of Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough, Ken Burns, Robert Massie, Dava Sobel, or even past AHA President Allan Nevins—the complicated relationship of professional history to its public audiences becomes all the more intriguing.
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When one defines professional history according to the norms of the academy, certain attributes tend to be valued above most others in defining what counts as "good history"—which is to say, history that professional historians recognize as "good." Good history is accurate. Professionals work extraordinarily hard to avoid errors, and can be quite contemptuous of those who make foolish mistakes when describing the past. Getting facts right generally trumps good storytelling. Good history is rigorous in its argumentation, deeply grounded in archival sources, fully in dialogue with the best recent work by leading scholars, and richly nuanced in its interpretative claims. The best professional historians spend years of their lives immersing themselves in the primary and secondary sources of their chosen subjects with the goal of attaining such a complex understanding that only scholars comparably immersed will recognize just how well the resulting work of history reflects the past it interprets. If such history is also written with elegance and grace, then it is very good indeed.
"What I wrote in my appreciation of Beach was that he’d converted me to valuing this kind of fine-grained empiricism more than I previously had. I came to admire the professional craft that it took to research and relate this knowledge (and Cronon notes that he similarly values this kind of effort) but I also realized more completely how scholarship is a very old and deep practice of collaboration between thousands of people separated by time and space. The exciting, engaging, communicative work that Cronon and I esteem often relies upon scholars who do “boring” work. You can’t synthesize or generalize without specialists doing their work first. "
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They go on to argue that this hyper-competitive system does not, in fact, produce the best possible science because scientists choose projects based on their likelihood of increasing their payoffs within these narrow domains (more grant dollars, more high profile publications, etc.), rather than on their likelihood to produce genuine scientific progress. In short, scientific progress only sometimes aligns with ambition, politics or funding priorities, but behavior almost always well, eventually.
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Continuing the above theme, Carpenter writes about particular issues within Psychology. The problem is known as the "file-drawer problem" in which negative results tend not to be published. Combine that with noisy results from small sample sized experiments and you have a tendency for statistical flukes to be published in high profile journals as if they were facts.
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He really ought to know that even with the protection of tenure and considerable autonomy, most faculty in most higher education put in long hours because they believe in their profession. So what’s going on here?
I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy.
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What’s lost? Well, in a word, quality and individual attention except for the precious few that can pay for the full luxury version of such services. The rich still had their suits tailored at Savile Row after everyone else was buying a mass-produced shirt. But in this case, those values might be more precious and important to the larger human missions of education, medicine, psychiatric treatment, auditing and so on. That’s really what you lose: the sense of vocation, of calling, of dedication to something bigger. The new publics of liberal democracy understood that education, medicine, law, accounting and so on were important to their resilience and thriving in a way that artisanal consumer products were not.
"And so on. So executive summary: one of the problems of a cheap communication high barrier to network world is that it creates incentives to two kinds of strategy which are market failure producing. One is the fake offer, which leads to the spam cycle, the other is the failure incentivized actor."
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For the dating site, the basic problem is that the interests of the dating site, and the people on it, are 100% in opposition to each other. Daters want to find dates, dating sites want people to not find dates. This is a death spiral: the most desirable people for a dating site are cheaters – particularly men – because they stay on, they are more attractive than they should be – and picky women who are looking to boost their egos by rejecting men. For the same reason, they are more attractive than they should be, and are on more. They need just enough matches so that desperate people will join, but matches disappear.
Is there a solution for this? The physical world places an offer cost: a store, clothing and the time to get ready for a date, physically flying in a candidate or flying out an interviewer. The network world can impose a cost to, but of a different kind.
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BTW, this applies to political activism. Activists are generally failures, because there is a huge incentive to be a failure. The activist proposition is to build up a network of people who are highly motivated by your cause, and give you money. This is a huge wall to climb. Once in place, it is easy to maintain. Hence failure is better, because a perpetual, unsolvable problem becomes legacy activism. Activists deserve being picked on, because the entrepreneurial model of activism has not served the people they get money from well, but it is far from an isolated case.
"Bank bosses have played a trick which countless ordinary workers do. The IT support guy who introduces lots of “security features” to his firm’s IT systems, or the secretary who has an incomprehensible filing system, make themselves indispensable by inconveniencing others."
"I want to suggest that the dichotomy between high risk protest and low risk participation that Gladwell isolates as typifying most historical social mmovement protests versus most contemporary online social movement participation is actually spot on. What is remarkable about the Occupy Wall Street protests is not that the ‘internets’ have somehow produced an effective mode of protest, but that the risks involved in the esculation of protest from low-risk online participation (‘liking’ a social movement on Facebook, for example) into actual high-risk toe-to-toe in-the-street vaulting-the-barricades mobilisation have now become risks worth taking for the majority of participants. "
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The protests are symptomatic of a US and broader neoliberal social structure whereby the average middle-class citizen is burdened with far greater risk than of previous generations. In the past, including the civil rights era as described by Gladwell, black populations were already at-risk in the sense of not being able to enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities as their white fellow citizens. The solidarity of white citizens was a leap of faith and a salutatory call to fighting against structural injustice. The ‘New Deal’ era of corporations and government assuming most of the social risks assumed by everyone living in a capitalist society have now largely been rolled back. The average US citizen accepts are greater degree of risk relative to the elite (the ’1%’) in fundamental or even ‘universal’ areas of social life, including health care and employment security. It means that US society has been transformed to such a degree that the everyday risks experienced as an average citizen are now so large that after weighing up the risks of protests against the structural risks they assume because of the social structure, the protesters have decided to accept the risks of protests as the lesser risk.
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I don’t imagination that the protests will end until the government and those that benefit from the current unjust, unequal distribution of risk correct their ways to make it more equitable. I am not sure that will happen, however, until those living in a globalised West realise that their middle-class lifestyles are gradually being off-shored as their jobs are being out-sourced and just as they want a more equitable distribution of risk, those in developing countries are desperate for a more equitable distribution of opportunity. The workers in developing nations are being used as a weapon to leverage subservience from workers in developed countries. To correct this could take generations.
"So what does this predict? Like Blinder’s aphorism, it suggests that we will observe a broad empirical correlation between (a) the extent of disagreement among economists, and (b) the involvement of economists in political disputes. ‘Eat your greens’ propositions that are popular among economists, but more or less equally uncongenial to all political actors in a given system will, as in Blinder’s formulation, be systematically ignored. But economists’ influence will not be particularly high when they disagree with each other, since different economists arguing for different sides of the political debate will at least partially cancel each other out. It will be far higher on those rare and fleeting occasions when economists unite in favor of the one or the other side actively participating in a political debate."
I would argue that the fundamental flaw in financial regulation is that it is based on the assumption that regulators are not self-interested individuals like the rest of us. We think about regulation only in terms of how to engineer the incentives of the regulated and ignore the fact that regulators themselves rarely have a stake in doing their job well, which in any other occupation would limit the motivation and types of individuals a position attracts.
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It is unlikely that consumers will ever hold much influence over the realities of the financial regulatory process because they are not organized in comparison to the financial industry, which concentrates significant resources in the creation of inefficient regulators. By and large, consumers are not well-informed about what they have at stake in the regulatory process and, even if they were, that would not be the sole determinant of how they define themselves politically.
Adding another layer of guards to guard the existing guards ultimately results in an infinite regress. I do not think it is cynical to suggest that, absent an actual paradigm shift with respect to accountability in the financial industry, we are just going to have more of the rent-seeking that has gone on to date and the economic calamities that ensue. For my part, I would propose opening up financial regulation to a small group of social entrepreneurs. Let people establish for-profit companies that can compete for government contracts to stress test the holdings of financial institutions independently and audit their records.
One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.
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There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.
This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.
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The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (”I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”) That’s why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.
You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don’t trust them — they’re profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.
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