It is indeed a big deal to hire people who will commit or contrive at fraud: academic, financial, or otherwise.
But the best (probably only) way to put downward pressure on that is via internal incentives, controls, and culture. You push hard enough for such percent per cadence with no upper bound and graduate the folks who reliably deliver it without checking if the win was there to begin with? This is scale-invariant: it could be in a pod, a department, a company, a hedge fund that owns much of those companies, a fund of those funds, the federal government.
Sooner or later your leadership is substantially penetrated by the unscrupulous. We see this in academia with the spate of scandals around publications. We see this in finance with, who can even count that high anymore. You see Holmes and SBF in prison but the folks they funded still at the apex of relevance and everyone from that clique? Everyone who didn’t just fall of a turnip truck knows has carried that ideology with them and has better lawyers now.
There’s an old saw that a “fish rots from the head”. We can’t look at every manner of shadiness and constant scandal from the iconic leaders of our STEM industry and say “good for them, they outsmarted the system” and expect any result other than a broad-spectrum attack on any honest, fair, equitable status quo.
We all voted with our feet (and I did my share of that too before I quit in disgust) for a “might makes right” quasi-religious system of ideals, known variously as Objectivism, Effective Altruism, and Capitalism (of which it is no kind). We shouldn’t be surprised that everything is kind of tarnished sticky now.
The answer today? I don’t know. Work for the less bad as opposed to more bad companies, speak out at least anonymously about abuses, listen to the leaders speak in interviews and scrutinize it. I’m open to suggestions.
But the best (probably only) way to put downward pressure on that is via internal incentives, controls, and culture. You push hard enough for such percent per cadence with no upper bound and graduate the folks who reliably deliver it without checking if the win was there to begin with? This is scale-invariant: it could be in a pod, a department, a company, a hedge fund that owns much of those companies, a fund of those funds, the federal government.
Sooner or later your leadership is substantially penetrated by the unscrupulous. We see this in academia with the spate of scandals around publications. We see this in finance with, who can even count that high anymore. You see Holmes and SBF in prison but the folks they funded still at the apex of relevance and everyone from that clique? Everyone who didn’t just fall of a turnip truck knows has carried that ideology with them and has better lawyers now.
There’s an old saw that a “fish rots from the head”. We can’t look at every manner of shadiness and constant scandal from the iconic leaders of our STEM industry and say “good for them, they outsmarted the system” and expect any result other than a broad-spectrum attack on any honest, fair, equitable status quo.
We all voted with our feet (and I did my share of that too before I quit in disgust) for a “might makes right” quasi-religious system of ideals, known variously as Objectivism, Effective Altruism, and Capitalism (of which it is no kind). We shouldn’t be surprised that everything is kind of tarnished sticky now.
The answer today? I don’t know. Work for the less bad as opposed to more bad companies, speak out at least anonymously about abuses, listen to the leaders speak in interviews and scrutinize it. I’m open to suggestions.