RE: Witness Consensus: @therealwolf
You can have two groups of people with the exact same system of incentives, yet resulting in different outcomes based on the attitudes of the people involved (see Bob Altemeyers psychological experiments where people play a political game. The game rules never change, but based on the selection of personality types for participants, you get radically different outcomes)
We don't have the option of changing the personality types involved, or even having any influence on it whatsoever. People come and go as they please.
We do have the option of changing the economic incentives and in fact you can run the same experiment as above in reverse: Keep the personality types (or individuals) the same and change the economic incentives. You will get most certainly different outcomes. (Of course this broad class of experiment has been run a huge number of times in both controlled psych research settings as well as many other systems.)
humans are not completely driven by incentives
I don't think anyone ever claimed this. That is not the same thing as saying that incentives don't influence behavior. They certainly do.
The individuals who have the largest stakes can change their policy on how they use that stake. That's not an option for me (I can only choose how I apply mine) but it is an option for them.
When people argue that we don't have a problem with culture, that is essentially what they are saying, that only incentives are a way for behaviour of participants in the system to change.
I'm going to say it again. We don't have a knob we can turn to change the culture. By contrast, we can adjust the code. Perhaps that influences culture but such uncertain influence is the best we can do. Culture is a dependent variable not an independent one.