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Without reading through that very long text, claiming that incentives don't influence human behavior is a wildly exotic claim.

There is near infinite evidence to the contrary. That said, constructing a system with "the right incentives" can of course be devilishly hard or even impossible.

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The claim is that it does change behavior, but only temporarily and it doesn't change the culture in a positive way / doesn't motivate people. It ends up feeling like a way of manipulating. That being said, according to this article, the entire incentive system would need to be dismantled. Simply adding more incentives wouldn't necessarily produce higher quality, at least not in the long run. So essentially the process of incentivizing new amazing research for funding is the primary issue and adding incentives for pointing out issues would just be a bandaid.

This sounds like a good critique of naive incentive schemes.

I don't think there is any doubt that humans follow incentives.

But working out what the core incentive problems are, and actually changing them might be both (1) intellectually difficult, and (2) challenge some sacred beliefs and strong power structures, thus making it practically impossible.

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