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.

How about "you get what you incentivize?"

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.

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.

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.

> 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".