I agree that unaligned incentives have lead to the replication crisis, but I fail to see how research driven by “curiosity” and not by “success” will align those incentives. The author admits that poor incentives have determined the course of academia/research, but I think rather than getting away with incentives altogether and just letting people be “creative”, we should find better ways to align incentives, and encourage a system of reliable peer review to restore the trust in research.
I think I agree with this. The "great minds" will always (or let's say often enough) be driven by intrinsic motivations. So the goal should probably be to give them "good enough" environments so that they can concentrate on what they deem interesting instead of struggling to "survive".
It's of course a bit tricky because sometimes it would be nice to have an accelerator or Google compute power at the ready and sometimes you can do excellent work as long as you have a roof over your head and are well fed and have a piece of paper and a pen :D
It's a complex problem, especially with competiton from other acedemic institutions and industry. I feel like the current system is ok-ish but many things are horribly wrong. I still feel like by and large good academic minds will end up in positions where they have a good environment to do what they want but the cost for this is that there's a lot of cruft and mediocre stuff that'll end up in essentially the same or better environments.
Also, as a mathematician I have little trouble if I get little money (as long as I can live decently). I cannot imagine at all what it costs to fund a biology department, or the LHC.
