The idea of designing incentives far less useful social scientists and policy wonks we're hoping circa 2010.
I agree with and enjoy the overall sentiment of this piece. Incentive are fit losers. BYO incentives is the way to go.
That said, IRL, the structural advantage of external incentives... especially artificially designed ones... Can be near impossible to overcome.
Let's say you are a researcher working in one of the fields tested by 21st century mushiness. Replication failures. P-hacking. An unstructured stream of published research adding up to noise.
This outcome is not just because of publish-or-perish, or other incentive structure. It's also because the field is just hard. Harder than it seems it should be, intuitively.
It seems like science should have uncovered a decent, workable "theory of nutrition" or a promising pathway to one. It hasn't. That means thousands of researchers are working in their little corners... And when they look up from their desk there is no big picture forming. No big project that they are contributing to.
Maybe we just need a new theory, when you research methods.. or something. But... we don't know what that is.
Intrinsic motivation vs academic grind... Facing a near impossible challenge. A good chance of modest success within the pigeon-incetives paradigm... Vs near-guaranteed failure of an alternative, intrinsic motivation path.
Even if you take the intrinsic motivation path... There will probably come a point where you have invested years, achieve nothing... and proudly refusing to publish banal papers like everyone else will seem like folley. This person probably just leaves the field.
Startups are different than the corporations they become. 19th century science is different to modern academia. Trying to replicate qualities is always sysephean.