I really like the article but I feel like ignoring incentives always costs something. Only people who can afford the cost get to look principled, which turns having money into looking like having character. Everyone he praises in the article has/had a safety net: Sumner was a Harvard-educated senator with inherited standing, the writer himself still had a career after dropping his uni title.
The fish metaphor has the same issue. The people dying on the sidewalk outside his conference have seen worse than he has, they don't lack moral clarity but rather the freedom and capital to rebuild their lives around it. His essay treats seeing the fish and acting on it as a single moment when the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net.
I think author jumps from high horse of only fortunate should survive to high horse of saving 8 billion people with magic wand.
You can't save the heroin addict with incentives.
You can't feed & cure all people in Africa with incentives because then in 20 years, the problem will tripple in dimensions.
Incentives in people which enables those people to "repay the debt" to create wealth for incentives to other people works.
Incentives for handicapped enables them to live better life, and decrase burden on their relatives (which enables them to create more).
Incentives in science sectors which don't have immediate "business vector" works.
Incentives are good, if they are supplemental in degree that's necessary ... and addressed precisely.
Otherwise they are waste of resources created through higher taxes (penalty for everyone).
It is true that privileged people can sacrifice more to do the right thing simply because they have much more than they need to survive. But most people of all levels of privilege can do better, and it's not a competition where you are only a success if you do the most good. Good is good even in small quantities regardless of if you ever have a statue made after you.
If the article writer had this perspective it would perhaps be more rounded and grounded instead of calling people who follow the incentives losers, dummys and schmucks.
Agreed, it is a flaw of the article, but I think their point is still correct (that we should all stand for something beyond what is easiest for us and not use incentives as a free pass for everything).
I usually go around saying to anyone who will listen "incentives are dangerous". Like... you can't avoid them as people are sneaky bastards and will find what the incentives are even if you didn't design any on purpose, but you should be on the lookout always and be damn careful if you ever get the bad idea to introduce any.
> the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net
Not really. If you go back in history, many figures did not have the capital / social safety net to follow their principles. Diogenes comes to mind. Buddha shunned his princely life. Epicurus. The OP did not say it would be easy.
Jobs are the simplest and most striking example of incentives. "Do this and you will get money, which you can spend on food and shelter".
Where a person living in abundance can choose to ignore monetary incentives, most people cannot. If you want to make behavior X be what a broad selection of people do, the only available way today is incentives. And a lot of problems we face today are exactly this sort of collective action problem - recycle, vote for good leaders, don't shit in the well.
Yes, it would be better that we lived in a world where most people were not "losers" (I.E. needs to work for money), but we're certainly not there yet.
That's the biggest myth of economics. It wasn't even true the pre-modern world except occasionally (famines were a real thing, but they were still kinda infrequent), and it's pretty much never true in an industrial civilization, let alone in an era of growing automation capabilities.
If resources are not scarce in industrial civilisation, why do you suppose people pay for them? Why is there a spot oil market, if oil is not scarce? And the same for all other commodities...
The game theorists/economists have studied this stuff in depth under the rubric of "mechanism design" or "market design". The relevant concept is "incentive compatibility" where the agents in the system do the right thing (whatever that was intended to be/designed for) because any deviation from that costs them more than playing nice.
The Wikipedia article [0] is not yet great but does give the two classic examples of "second-price auctions and a simple majority vote between two choices". The Gibbard–Satterthwaite shows the difficulty in extending this to more choices (in that Arrow's theorem sort of way).
The best thing I've read on this stuff is Alvin Roth's "Who Gets What and Why" (2015) [1] which is worth a read in any case. Repugnant markets!
My experience tring to map game theory to people's choices in the workplace is that the action taken is typically opposite of the predicted, or optimal, 'game theoretic' action, and often with enormous benefit to that individual.
I remember this book: Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn
"The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train a family pet. The quick fix of rewards may seem to be effective, but manipulating people with external incentives actually kills their interest in what they are doing and lowers the quality of their work."
Thanks to something (possibly the ruinous adhd medication regime I went through for my entire childhood) I don't really get any motivation from promises of carrots, only the sticks I try to avoid. Works great though, not unhappy, because doing good work still intrinsically satisfies me. I just really don't care about pleasing people (and yet I often do)
I never was medicated for anything, yet I still couldn't ever bring myself to care for "rewards". But then the "rewards" in childhood were kinda pointless. Like a good grade. Can't buy anything with a good grade, so what does it matter?
I've found myself caring more for video game worlds, since there's a sense of progress coupled with useful rewards in the context of what you are doing. There never was a reward in school that made school work easier.
Videogames--and later making / changing them--was my jam growing up. Unlike people who may emotionally hurt you (or you them), games and machines are controllable and predictable. Even multi-player gaming had more feeling of control than messy reality.
School by comparison was usually heavily regimented and too abstract for me. Thankfully higher grades in my district granted more and more choices and autonomy.
> My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed
One individual can ignore incentives. The point of that diagnosis is that you can't build a system on the premise that most people will behave well despite incentives, because many won't. It's a point about systems, not individuals.
It's worth thinking about incentives from the standpoint of feedback control theory. Typically, you have an input, an output, a measurement of the output, and an output goal. There is some lag between the input and the output, and there may be lag between the output and the measurement of the output used to drive the controller.
The output will oscillate somewhat, more if there is more lag. Too much lag will result in oscillation so bad that convergence never happens. Much of classic control theory is devoted to understanding when that will happen and what to do about it.
Incentive systems often suffer from error and excessive lag between the output and the measurement of the output. This is a known problem in quality control. See Deming, the Toyota Production System, and continuous improvement. Even if you're measuring the desired output in a reasonable way, lag in that measurement will cause oscillation, and may prevent convergence.
School grades and work performance reviews are examples of systems with high lag between
output and the measurement of output. That happens even if the metrics are good, but not immediate.
If the measurement method is noisy, it may have to be filtered before use. This adds to lag. (Think about how a trailing moving average works.) Many incentive systems also have that property. School tests are intermittent noisy measurements filtered out by averaging.
These are known problems with incentive systems, but not well-known problems. Even if you're measuring the right thing, you can hit these problems.
I suspect that the author and many of the commenters have experienced the "bad project manager" effect.
MANY people have dealt with terrible project managers and therefore assume all project managers are bad. This is because great project managers are very rare.
The same is true about incentive schemes. Most of them are improperly designed and/or get hit by Goodheart's law. [0]
As a counter point, this article [1] about designing incentives for farm labor is excellent and shows that with careful thought, incentives can dramatically increase output.
I've also been reading Deming's last book [2] and he is VERY against sales commissions. Some of this is probably bad design (e.g. 100% of the commissions for a sale go to one person) but I do feel he makes a valid point that everyone at a firm should benefit from helping the customer. Highly recommend it as an alternative to the more mainstream business books.
> In the eternal game of cat and mouse between the goodhearted people trying to fix the incentives and the Goodhart’d people trying to exploit the incentives, I am rooting for the cats.
His rhetorical "Who could disagree that incentives causes bad behavior?" resolves, in reality, to a shockingly large number of real people. This is fundamentally why I do not share the author's gripe, even if it might be technically true.
The pathologies in our collective decision making at the political level caused by the inability of so many people to give credence to the power of incentives is the problem that needs to be solved, even if, in the author's weird online niche composed of a few thousand people, incentives are occasionally wrongly taken as a moral justification for bad behavior.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious parallels to Nietzsche's idea of the "superman", a person who will not bow to incentives but make their own value structure.
To me the analogy of the monstrous fish is also very reminiscent of Nietzsche's story in "the gay science" of the madman exclaiming in horror at the public square:
> "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"
Realising this horrid truth opens an opportunity to defy the structure of society and follow one's own convictions.
But as augment_me says above, not everyone can bear the cost of ignoring incentives. I think all of us have stories where we had a good conception of what the right thing was, and wanted to do the right thing, but money trouble or job security meant we had to follow bad incentives- I certainly do.
In a conversation about careers, a friend of mine casually dropped a simple approach to life that has helped me a lot: you can’t have everything all the time, so make the best of what you got. Some years you will have health and knowledge but be poor, others years you will build wealth but may not be able to uphold your moral values, etc.
I may not have the luxury to ignore bad incentives right now, but I try to make lemonade from the lemons life throws at me so that one day I can.
The idea of designing incentives far less useful social scientists and policy wonks we're hoping circa 2010.
I agree with and enjoy the overall sentiment of this piece. Incentive are fit losers. BYO incentives is the way to go.
That said, IRL, the structural advantage of external incentives... especially artificially designed ones... Can be near impossible to overcome.
Let's say you are a researcher working in one of the fields tested by 21st century mushiness. Replication failures. P-hacking. An unstructured stream of published research adding up to noise.
This outcome is not just because of publish-or-perish, or other incentive structure. It's also because the field is just hard. Harder than it seems it should be, intuitively.
It seems like science should have uncovered a decent, workable "theory of nutrition" or a promising pathway to one. It hasn't. That means thousands of researchers are working in their little corners... And when they look up from their desk there is no big picture forming. No big project that they are contributing to.
Maybe we just need a new theory, when you research methods.. or something. But... we don't know what that is.
Intrinsic motivation vs academic grind... Facing a near impossible challenge. A good chance of modest success within the pigeon-incetives paradigm... Vs near-guaranteed failure of an alternative, intrinsic motivation path.
Even if you take the intrinsic motivation path... There will probably come a point where you have invested years, achieve nothing... and proudly refusing to publish banal papers like everyone else will seem like folley. This person probably just leaves the field.
Startups are different than the corporations they become. 19th century science is different to modern academia. Trying to replicate qualities is always sysephean.
> Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing.
And, people are also being rewarded for doing the right thing. Don't conflate the two.
Just because some incentives are rewarding the wrong behavior doesn't invalidate the concept. We're surrounded by incentives at work in every part of our life.
Fiat money only works because we are incentivized to believe in it.
Democracy works because we're mostly incentivized to support it.
Governments, countries, companies, parks, global trade, science, and shipping only work because of the complex web of positive and negative incentives we've built up to support them. They're not perfect, and never will be. And they also shouldn't be perfect (despite our natural inclination to want the "perfect"). The worst atrocities humankind has seen were driven by the pursuit of perfection and purity.
The cobra effect is what happens when you choose your incentives poorly. That's not a fault of the concept.
>My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. How could you be expected to break a rule, forego a promotion, or give up decimal of your grade point average, for the sake of—what? Doing the right thing?
But this misunderstands incentive based analysis.
The point isn't just that people naturally follow incentives, but that those who refuse are punished and no longer in a position to affect the world.
Taking a principled stand is great and all, but if the result is simply that you get fired and replaced by someone better at following orders, you didn't really fix the problem.
Of course it's more complicated than that. Certainly other people being willing to do evil is no excuse to do evil yourself. Maybe your principled stand inspires others and you start a revolution or something. But that's rare. In the average case incentives win. Which is why if you want to actually change the world for the better you should attack the incentives not the individuals - individuals can be replaced, but millions are willing to follow incentives.
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The rest of the article seems to be about developing your own morality, but morality is really just yet another incentive.
Maybe more succinctly: incentives work whether anyone cares or not, which is broadly the hallmark of good public policy. As foolish as relying on heroism in technology, so too is relying on perfect behavior from the citizenry in government.
I think your comment is describing something slightly different from incentives: the criteria for granting power and control to some individuals rather than others. There may be incentives to do what's necessary to fulfill those criteria, but it's a different axis from the incentives themselves.
Responding to the actual article: it seems like the author simply has a different set of values than what is assumed by the conventional incentives that he sees around him. If you choose your values then you can also choose your incentives.
I think you've written a good counterargument, but I disagree with your claim that "morality is really just yet another incentive". Incentives must be external.
Agreed, but I think some logic follows that as increasingly more incentives are needed then maybe people just don't have these principles. People seem to want it both ways—both to get the thing they want, but to be seen as not having taken it. To be seen as principled without standing for the principle. So we hear that taking a "principled stand is great and all, but". That line is right, it just implies the person doesn't believe that much in the principle.
Similar to the post, I find the discussion of incentives quite often ridiculous, as if no one ever does something because they want to do something nice. As Adam Smith said, "Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely". They don't just follow the incentives.
I also think it’s more like delayed gratification. Good incentives are for good people bad incentives are for fools. The further you can push back short-term incentives in favor of long-term, the better your life will be. Like we all “know” that love is better than coffee but in the morning many of us would/do choose coffee. Food, drugs, porn all short-term pleasures are “less good” than prosperity, but we often choose the quick dopamine hit over the long, difficult road
I mean, tautologically, I guess all the good parts of prosperity and none of the bad. Not a proof of correctness but a list:
1. Wealth gotten by one’s own work, or by wise management
2. A lender never a borrower
3. Desires generally satisfied
4. Leaving an inheritance for children/future generations
I tend to think of the Kulaks that Trotsky wanted to work with but that Stalin sent to Siberia
Completely agree. Incentives are for the statistical masses.
As thinking individuals we can and should use our awareness and courage to make biggest "good" choices we can bear to. We can't all be zero-waste vegan community organisers lobbying for renewables and free education/healthcare, but I doubt living life with the blinders on leads any kind of moral or spiritual growth or fulfilment either.
> As thinking individuals we can and should use our awareness and courage to make biggest "good" choices we can bear to.
That’s the cool thing about incentives, we follow them whether we realize it or not. “bear to” is where the incentives are hiding. We don’t make the best choices, we choose from the choices available to us.
You can’t fight your environment forever.
If the gooder choice is 50km away and the bad choice is down the street, eventually you’ll stop going 50km out of your way every day because it’s just too cumbersome. You might even do it “just this once” because you had a busy day and your kid is crying and you’re just so tired and then before you know it, it’s been months or even years since the last time you did the cumbersome better thing.
Incentives are also for when a principal just doesn't care about the difference between two possible choices. But maybe other people indirectly do, and an incentive like price can weigh the scales so that people indifferent to the choice choose the right one.
> We can't all be zero-waste vegan community organisers lobbying for renewables and free education/healthcare
Why? If you genuinely believe these things righteous and important why can’t everyone do them?
Perhaps because you’re incentivised not to: it’s a waste of your time, someone else can do your share of the campaigning, non-vegan food tastes great etc..
This is exactly how incentives work, not some spineless person in a dark room saying “yes m’lord I’ll torture another child for an extra nickel” as the article portrays.
It's not satire. They just really wanted to tell us all how very, very special they are, not one of the little people...sorry...statistical masses. Someone never got over reading Atlas Shrugged.
The satisfaction and feeling of superiority that comes from knowing that you did the right thing despite incentives to the contrary, in fact, is a very potent incentive in itself. You can totally get addicted to it.
> Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing.
I like the article overall but this part seems overly uncharitable. I think the next step of your development would be to have your own incentives without looking down on other's who you think lack their own. You should be able to know who you are without shitting on others.
I loved this. Unfortunately, I don't know how realistic it is at this point. The entire modern Western system is built on incentives, and it would require dramatically changing the social order and economic system.
I know it's kinda beside the point but I like incentives compared to hard rules as a policy measure. They are much more effective, less bureaucratic and easier to push through. They are like weights vs. booleans.
Don't like smoking? Try out right banning it. It's impossible. You have to fight the lobbyist, the addicted consumers, the workers employed by the industry, ... Slapping a tax on it is much easier. A soft NO that's giving everyone time to adjust.
The problem with "absolute" taxes (A fixed % of the price for everyone) is that they punish the poor but don't affect the rich, while most of the problems out there are caused by the rich, because they are more powerful.
You don't care about a carbon tax on your extremely polluting plane tickets if this represents 0,01% of your revenue.
One solution is to make the tax proportional to your revenue, like in Switzerland speed tickets are which means someone already got 1.7M fine from one over-speed limit driving. But then people will manage to lie about their revenue, as rich always do.
Then you could say that it's linked to the person, not the money, so in France if you drive too fast your driving licence is suspended. But once again, that would completely destroy a poor person life, not being able to go to his job anymore, while a rich will be a bit annoyed but just pay a cab.
It would be so much better if people were doing the right thing because they knew it is the right thing, instead of having to add incentive to push them to do so.
Our planet is burning right now, that would be a good moment to act.
On the other hand, there are vastly fewer rich people than poor, so for many things it doesn't matter if they can pay the fine. If only millionaires were littering, the streets would be quite clean.
That's all nice on a theoretical but such ideas quickly fall flat in a world where corporations are owned by rich people and create pollution often whole countries are even unable to pull off, often completely unpunished often economically and politically ("we need more jobs") encouraged.
I think reducing individuals to two people whose only difference is wealth in respect to which goods they can buy is wrong when applied to real world societies in the same way that weather prognosis based on a very limited set of parameters is wrong.
Wealth is not a measure to pay just fines or good, but today effectively the approximation for power that individuals, groups of individuals or legal entities hold. And measuring wealth is a huge complex topic on its own which also makes the taxation topic very complicated.
I think that's a huge flaw in present day economical thought. X is good because it increases X/Y ignoring secondary effects. It's like predicting whether it will rain on a given day by just looking at which way the wind goes on your weather station. There is theoretical truth to it, but given both secondary effects and the rest of the world that you might completely ignore but might have complete or partial reversal effects.
And then you have various groups that anyway mess with the details of the rules and people that ignore them through various other means, like not getting caught.
Classic example is also "We raise taxes, because then the rich will go away" which ignores things from "the rich" potentially not giving you anything if they don't give you taxes and the fact that your country might be able to offer a bit more both as a living and a working place than the level of taxes. In fact there have been studies conducted and the reality is that it barely has an effect. Turns out that people don't just leave for paying something that might even indirectly benefit them. Just like if you are rich you probably don't care much if the price for base goods increases, because you might have way bigger incentives like being in a secure place, having a house and family at a place and your company currently running smoothly with no downtrend in sight.
Another example: In Germany the chancellor decided that workers take too much "sick leave". Fair enough (probably) but they decided to clamp down on it by requiring a doctor's certificate from day one. Rookie mistake! For the doctors it piles on extra bureaucracy. Everyone who's actually sick is either miserable waiting in a doctor's office just to get some paperwork done or picks the lesser evil and goes to work sick where they infect the remaining colleagues.
An incentive based solution is: reduced pay on sick days. With _no pay_ you get sick people at work. With _full pay_ you get healthy people at home. With _reduced pay_ you can find a sweet spot. That adds no bureaucracy for doctors. For employers there is some but it directly translates into cost savings.
If I've got told, "oh btw, when you are sick you only get 70% of your wage" my risk management system would go full alarm mode. That's a risk I wouldn't want to take on me.
However whatever Germany is doing right now definitely isn't the way to to either.
Well, what do you expect from electing politicians who trust nobody and believe everyone's lying for money?
I've heard that doctors now issue at least 5-day sick notes even for the most minor thing, so his policy for forcing people to go to work has backfired.
Fair enough but cutting the tax is another incentive measure: make the legal way to buy cigarettes the cheapest way. As the article states: the fact illicit tobacco is illegal does not prevent it and poses massive enforcement costs.
> This is a useful metaphor, because I think at the center of everyone’s psyche is some version of the Big Horrible Fish: some unexamined assumption that, if you fully considered it, would require you to upend a significant portion of your life.
This ties in with the Mental Immune System, and the Emotional Cost theory of perception.
Kudos for the fish analogy though, that's much better.
This might be decent advise on an individual level, but "just be virtuous" is no basis for government or company policy (which is what discussions about incentives usually revolve around, I've never seen "I was just following the incentives" used as an excuse for anything).
'“People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?'
Since the author seems genuinely baffled, the answer is "because they are just bad people". They're bad people, nothing we can do will fix that they are bad people, it's so their fault, so there's no need to consider incentive structures or anything like that. They're just going to have to be better people and the things providing bad incentives have no fault or responsibility for the bad behavior and/or bad outcomes.
The sad and ugly truth is that there's is a certain amount of that in play in the real world. However if I could only pick one of the two extremes, "it's all incentives" works be the more productive one. It's not the whole truth but I do think it is substantially closer than the other extreme.
Incentives are about tricking the selfish side of people into doing things that are valuable for others, which can be an incredibly powerful force, but it’s not the only way to get people to do things, and it’s not okay to be absolutely selfish and outsource your responsibility to the system.
Experimental History is one of those few blogs that are a guaranteed read for me. I'll make time in the morning to read whatever he publishes. Thank you for sharing!
On the moral front, see The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion"
by Jonathan Haidt (2013). This has a nice analysis of why different people think about ethics quite differently. Haidt looks at axes of morality - Harm, Tradition, Obedience to Authority, and two others. He points out that how people weight those axes differs widely. People in developed countries with some education tend to weigh Harm much higher than the other axes. Agricultural societies weigh Tradition and Obedience to Authority more.
This is a key difference between Left and Right in the US. (He's writing before Trump, notice.) Once you see this, it's obvious. Strongly recommend the book.
That makes perfect sense - the less you are able to assess "harm" for yourself (because you are not educated or worldly) the more you should rely on external cultural consensus.
Incentives are important for allocative efficiency, whether that be the price of a banana or the incentive to do a job that pays more. Of course, they're imperfect and there are some cases where incentives lead to rent-seeking rather than genuinely economic efficiency. And there is often a divergence between private value and social value. But these are exceptions to the rule. If everyone ignored price signals, society would be less well off.
This doesn't mean we should all attempt to do the highest possible paying job available to us, but it does mean there's a genuine loss to society if (say) a high paid software engineer decides to quit and start a bike repair shop i.e. the economic pie will be smaller an so will the tax base. So when making the decision we should at least be conscious of this.
As an economist, I do kind of agree with the premise of the article, but in a different way. As consumers in particular, we can do much better than following incentives.
For instance, we can use the car less, even if it's a bit inconvenient. It's much nicer to see more people out walking, on their bikes or on the bus, leads to less noise and congestion. So there's a positive externality. Or I could buy a smaller car, even though bigger one is more convenient.
Similarly, if you're lucky enough to have a high paying job, you can buy all sorts of status symbols. Or, you could choose to consume less than you earn, and give the difference to charity, or invest in something of social value.
Whether you agree with this or not, economic theory provides a clear framework to think about all of this, both the price signal and the difference between private and social incentives. What bothers me (as the article touches on) is that people often have a simplified view of economics which is essentially that 'market incentives and price signals broadly lead to good outcomes (or at least, better outcomes than communism!), and therefore economics always morally endorses buying things at market prices'. There's nothing in economic theory that says that spending £50k more on a car because it's got a fancier brand is a reasonable moral choice.
As someone who has helped drug addicts in an organisation called "Proyecto Hombre" in Spain you probably don't understand how hard is to help someone in this situation and that sometimes you CAN'T.
It is very typical that when someone gets on drugs even the father of the person stops trying to help after several failed trials. Only the mothers stay. And it is so painful to watch. The kind of abuses mothers tolerate from their children.
Substances destroys the typical regulating behaviour of the brain. They literally can't see the harm they do to others. You usually can't help them until they hit rock bottom and open a window for you to intervene.
For helping you need knowledge and training and "trying to help" without it could do more harm than good.
About the moral obligation to help the drug addicts, as "social justice", I would call this "injustice". Here is the typical situation: Someone takes drugs in a social group because is "cool". In the same group there is someone that decides not to take them. He is humiliated by the group and it takes a lot of work. One of the members of the group gets addicted, do terrible things and asks for help.
It is usual that the one that did not take drugs, or the brother in the family ask the question "why are you helping this person that decided to go this way herself?"
"Why are you expending like 10x more resources in this person that did everything wrong than in me when did everything well (studied instead of earning easy money selling drugs, that had to withstand the pressure and humiliations by the group).
Drugs are super expensive and addicts will do anything to get their dose, supporting the addicts usually takes all the resources from a family, neglecting the resources to other members of the family. If the State provides the support, the same thing happens. Should the State spend exorbitant resources that the rest of the society has to pay taking the resources from everyone that needs them?
This article reflects my values and philosophy exactly... However I think the author is underestimating the cost of not following incentives. It's torture.
In this society, I'm a loser precisely because I ignored incentives. I think we live in a failed society so I don't mind that much being a loser in such society. I don't think I would feel any pride being a winner... However, I would very much appreciate the financial comfort of not having to participate in it! So that would be the advantage of being a winner.
It's the great irony; the winners who have the option to not participate, want to participate... And the losers who ignore incentives find that they are forced to participate sooner or later!
Right now I think my current job is probably unethical. Though most people would probably not think so. They just didn't look for the devil in the details.
Most people are lucky to have been following incentives subconsciously, believing that incentives align with economic efficiency and, therefore, moral virtue. I was not so lucky to believe that. Now I have to do stuff that I know to be unethical to free myself. Is this the definition of corruption? Isn't it a worse form of corruption if you don't even bother trying to understand the impact of what you're doing? Or worse, you deceive yourself?
I think as a culture, we teach the wrong things to kids.
1) Bribe/corruption is okay: Do this (eat broccoli, finish homework, etc) and I'll give you an incentive/bribe (candy, play time, screen time).
2) Magic: Kids are scientific and curious, they ask millions of questions. Explain everything away by magic (fairytales), religion, god, govt, economics, etc. Nobody has the knowledge or patience to deal with the continuous stream of questions.
We train kids to accept these things as defaults of culture.
As far as 2) goes, I don't think that is actually true. Sometimes people don't have time for children's questions, but when a child asks why summer is different than winter nobody in modern times says because Demeter is sad about the rape of her daughter.
I think implicit in this argument is a proposal that society stops making excuses for anti-social people and behavior, and shames them and their behavior instead. Ironically, this is just a different incentive system! But IMO that doesn't make the argument less correct. It is a more full realization that "people respond to incentives", including shame.
develop or rediscover a culture that views people as possessing inherent dignity, reason, empathy and individual freedom instead of promoting a commercial culture whose logical terminus are the Wall-E people.[1]
Practical first step would be to return to Humboldt's model of education[2] and to not devalue to arts and humanities at every opportunity.
And thankfully millions of people are already doing it. But the good of small actions from normal people is in the balance with the evil of terrible actions from powerful people, the last example being the current president of the US.
So the message of it is - "if people have a lot of agency because they have liquid capital and network that allows them to not give a shit about incentives, they usually behave better and create more valuable stuff for society"? I agree with it. But this is almost an uncomfortably far-right take, because this is same as claiming that systemic, generational inequality is a virtue.
Even if you think you cannot escape incentives - there exists a thing for shaping them - it is called "regulation". Some still consider it a dirty word though.
Very good write-up and connects to a lot of ideas I've been working through.
First I completely agree with the author that you have to "bring your own incentives" instead of trying to discern them from the environment. In fact conversation is often confused when people just try to figure out the incentive structure.
Consider this most existential topic - whether an individual (and therefore society) is capable of producing children. On the "no" side you are readily supplied with a list of incentive-shaped rationalization: eg it's too expensive, climate change, etc. On the "yes" side people just aren't evaluating those dis-incentives - they come in with a value-based motivation (children are important, children are the future) and act of out that - with the "obstacles" being something to overcome not something to base the decision on.
So that's an example of where coming with your own incentives is key. Existentially.
On the other hand aligned incentives matter. For example when I was growing up I was "academically and engineering minded" which is that I enjoyed useful learning and demonstrating knowledge through practical application. And luckily both my family and most teachers gave good vibes about this in return. I'm sure that helped.
So maybe the most critical thing is to bring your own incentives but the second most critical thing is that they align. For example, I bring a high-ownership perspective to my job - which basically means I try to do what's actually most existential or strategic for the business. I just wrapped up 4 years in a FAANG where the incentives were aligned very much away from that, to the point where a VP had to tell me that she could only reward me for things that aligned specifically to my role profile, not for reaching out beyond the role to actually move the needle (btw totally understandable why big companies have to operate that way - but an example where "good" and "incentive" were not aligned.)
So I was faced with a choice - "die on the hill" for what I know is right, or follow the incentive structure. What did I actually do? Bail for a smaller company where I routinely work with the CEO and senior leadership directly and there's no gap between "what's right for the business" and "what I should be doing"
So still being your own incentives is key - but secondarily you (a) want to be in a place whose incentives reflect what you think is right already and (b) create such an environment for the kind of people you want to be and work with.
As an analogy you want to have your own compass for where you want to go. But ideally the wind and the tides are helping you go in that direction. But shoueknthe winds and tides shift your direction doesn't. Or shouldn't. Back to my first example, think about all the people who are chosing to not have a family just because it's not enough vogue today and there's no peer pressure. It's a sort of self-contained extinction event because someone doesn't have the instinct to fight that momentum. I use this example because it's hard to think of something more existential.
> A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose.
This is actually a fairly recent concept.
For a long time, humans across the globe have believed that life had a purpose, but until the 18th and 19th centuries, the belief was more or less that the purpose was dictated by God, the universe, etc. That there was a purpose that applied to everyone, not that everyone had to find his or her own purpose.
> That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong.
The problem with this is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well-meaning people who believe strongly that they are increasing the right and decreasing the wrong are capable of creating many problems. And sometimes, you get really sick people who think they're well-meaning and their "right" is everyone else's "wrong".
> But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.
I'm personally not a fan of the Elons and Zucks of the world, but going around categorizing people into groups like "spiritually chinless, passionless, purpose-lacking sniveling little twerps who only care about getting ahead" probably isn't healthy.
Has the author considered that many of these people simply have beliefs, passions, purposes that don't align with his and that, if asked, they might speak poorly of his beliefs, passions, purposes?
We can debate whether or not these people are, in the final analysis, ethical, but I don't think reducing them to this helps the author's argument.
> Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to?
Most people in this world don't have the luxury of sitting around and figuring out all of the world's mysteries and solving all of the world's problem.
> I saw my fish in 2020 in San Fransisco, during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.5 Inside the conference hotel were dozens of talks about stereotyping, prejudice, inequality, and so on. That had never struck me as strange until that year, when outside of the hotel, which was in the middle of SF’s Tenderloin district, people were sprawled out on the sidewalk, dying of overdoses. Scholars were scurrying past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is ironic because “scholars will scurry past homeless people to give talks on social justice” is literally the main finding from one of the most famous psychology studies of all time.
The author paints his experience as some sort of Siddhartha-like epiphany. The reality is that lots of people have seen what the author saw, and worse. Any many were affected by it. But just because they didn't stop and play Jesus (which the author apparently didn't do either) doesn't mean that they didn't notice and weren't affected.
The author seems to be assuming that he's one of the few people who isn't oblivious.
> When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered. They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance to forge their own values.
Like what? The article is really lacking in specifics and it seems like it's a reflection of the author's experience and views, which he projects onto the other 8 billion people on the planet.
In my own experience, which includes having emigrated from the US to another part of the world, most people are just trying to get through the day, pay their bills, provide for their families, find peace and contentment, etc. They're not morally-corrupt zombies who, at best, are oblivious to the suffering in the world or, at worst, bad apes chasing free bananas. They're just people who don't have any illusions that their lives and powers are bigger than they really are.
I think the point is, society is trying to maximize wealth instead of maximizing happiness and fulfilment. We are being told that to be successful is to be rich, while we should be told that to be successful is to be happy. And the reason is that you don't need much to be happy. So the day we say this to the citizens, the day we all realize buying things is useless, the whole economic system collapses, and no one wants to be in charge during the very hard transition period between the two systems. The interesting thing is, because the planet has limited resources, because we don't take care of it and because we don't control wealth inequality, the switch will happen, unplanified, and millions (billions?) of humans will die.
There's a difference between being born into a world where you are taught you have a purpose defined by God, the universe, etc., and being born into a culture where you are taught you need to find your own purpose.
It's both. You have a purpose defined by God, but you have to understand what it is and the journey is your own. There are a lot of hints, explanations, personal stories, but you have to do some work to understand what they mean.
The historical evidence is pretty clear that the modern idea you have a unique purpose you need to find for yourself started to become common in the 18th and 19th centuries. Before that, purpose was largely a dictate cast upon all members of the society.
This seems to misrepresent what incentives are: latent unobservable things. Incentives are not what you or anyone else says they are. It makes sense to simply state the incentives in academic games which are of course useful at times.
So the author is making some point about wrong incentive models and meta models.
Very few people are self starters, I’ve become fixated on increasing the productivity of the population. Anyone excluded or encumbered has things to address why that is, and then add them to the productivity machine. At one point women weren’t included, other marginalized people are excluded, some populations have a tendency to suicide unless we affirm their feelings and then they are productive. All of that fits within my philosophy and makes the tweaks to the workflow easy adopt, if it means more people are included in the productivity engine.
Most of the comments are one level deeper “lets condition all of society to be self starters” with no proposal on how to do so
If I kill someone, or behave like an asshole, everyone will hate me, so I've got an incentive not to. Is that so horrible?
The reason that people talk about incentives when it comes to politics is that laws and large parts of present day's richer countries economic systems are controlled by laws, contracts, associations between countries, companies, people, etc. and are an artificially created ruleset. That means if you change rules you change incentives. Eg. if you know a government will bail you out, you lose the incentive to avoid risky things, if there is a tax on something you are it will influence your monetary incentives, if being an asshole is looked upon favorably then you have an incentive to be one. Also if tax fraud isn't considered a crime by large parts of people or is seen as smart then you have an incentive to commit it.
A lot of social change good and bad came from shifts in good and bad incentives.
Even more. If you look at the legal and prison systems in Norway vs eg the US the incentives that individuals, governments and corporations have are a reason for a 5 year recidivism rate of 70% vs 20%.
In general if you think your life will be better as a criminal than the alternative then you will be incentivized become one. If you can choose between joining the mafia that might even care for you or barely getting through with day jobs then you are incentivized to do so.
So if a government manages to make sure your life will certainly better, than the incentive to join is a whole lot lower.
If you are shamed vs praised (or otherwise feel supported) for sexism or racism you will have an incentive to go a certain way.
Cults and so on used incentives in a bad way, many parents use incentives in a good way ("if you clean up your room/finish your homework/behave you'll get ice cream later").
The reason people talk about incentives is because they shape whether things are likely to work out. As we've seen big public companies usually will do everything they can get away with and will break laws if the expected profit is higher than the potential fine. That is a wrong and very much changeable incentive.
And it doesn't have to be laws. It can be public opinion. If the marketing is more expensive than just not doing a bad thing in first place then that's an incentive as well.
Incentives are the things that make people do things good and bad. Incentives are the reason people go out of bed and be it just the incentive to ease the pressure on their full bladder. And even there if getting up will cost you great pain you might have a higher incentive there.
Just like people going to doctors is often dominated by incentives of getting rid of a sickness vs not having to pay money or endure a potentially painful or side effect rich treatment.
Who cares what names you call. I would be more powerful and comfortable in this world. While you spend your time calling names that would have zero effect in this world. You would be like a donkey who cries its lust away. Sounds like a total loser to me..
There's certainly a grain of truth, but there's also a lot of idealism and naivete.
First, there's the false dichotomy. Only psychopaths do things purely and only for the incentives. Others modify their behavior in incentive optimizing ways, but within the constraints of what they think are right and wrong.
The author brings the confidence of the newly religious. They have found some great truth, seem the great fish, and now anyone else who has not reached this acceptable level of fervor is, in their words, a loser. Perhaps the fish the author has seen is also not that great? Compared to the vastness of the ocean? And they just haven't seen one of the many even bigger fish yet? And then may someday realize that all fish look different to all people and some people have found their fish and it's different from your fish, it may even look not that great to you, but what matters is how it looks to the beholder.
What is the author even arguing for? Because it comes off as "care more".
The premise of this article only works because the author has taken an overly narrow definition of an 'incentive' - as if an incentive can only be offered by a social media app for a quick dopamine hit.
What's they are missing is that it's all incentives, all the way down. You want to be a good kind person? You feel good when you believe you've demonstrated this - but you're just acting on incentives you've set for yourself to feel good. You want to feel morally superior by quitting social media (thereby avoiding the overt incentives to the contrary) or donating more to charity? Same thing - you're following incentives you've created for yourself to be the person you want to be and be seen as.
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Also, FWIW, I strongly disliked the mid-article moralisation - implying that people are somehow flawed, inferior individuals if they haven't examined every aspect of their world and developed a deep understanding of it that could never be challenged. This is just a self-serving conceit of someone who feels superior because they think they see the matrix (or fish). The world is full of people who live their lives as best they can, trying to be decent people as best they can, without having the time, energy, or incentive to dive deeper into things as the author seems to believe they should. Are they inferior people? No. So f#ck this author and their snide superior moralistic b#llshit.
> without having the time, energy, or incentive to dive deeper into things
I don't think anyone would disagree that survival comes first. But for those who do have the time/energy/money to dive deeper into things, and intentionally choose not to... those people may be worthy of our contempt
> But for those who do have the time/energy/money to dive deeper into things, and intentionally choose not to... those people may be worthy of our contempt
Feels like an intellectual puritanism. Of course you must spend your time not on frivolities but solely on mind-expanding pursuits...
I really like the article but I feel like ignoring incentives always costs something. Only people who can afford the cost get to look principled, which turns having money into looking like having character. Everyone he praises in the article has/had a safety net: Sumner was a Harvard-educated senator with inherited standing, the writer himself still had a career after dropping his uni title.
The fish metaphor has the same issue. The people dying on the sidewalk outside his conference have seen worse than he has, they don't lack moral clarity but rather the freedom and capital to rebuild their lives around it. His essay treats seeing the fish and acting on it as a single moment when the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net.
I think author jumps from high horse of only fortunate should survive to high horse of saving 8 billion people with magic wand.
You can't save the heroin addict with incentives. You can't feed & cure all people in Africa with incentives because then in 20 years, the problem will tripple in dimensions.
Incentives in people which enables those people to "repay the debt" to create wealth for incentives to other people works.
Incentives for handicapped enables them to live better life, and decrase burden on their relatives (which enables them to create more).
Incentives in science sectors which don't have immediate "business vector" works.
Incentives are good, if they are supplemental in degree that's necessary ... and addressed precisely. Otherwise they are waste of resources created through higher taxes (penalty for everyone).
This is consistent with his premise. See, the title says it: incentives are for losers.
If you're already a winner you can escape from incentives. No contradiction.
It is true that privileged people can sacrifice more to do the right thing simply because they have much more than they need to survive. But most people of all levels of privilege can do better, and it's not a competition where you are only a success if you do the most good. Good is good even in small quantities regardless of if you ever have a statue made after you.
If the article writer had this perspective it would perhaps be more rounded and grounded instead of calling people who follow the incentives losers, dummys and schmucks.
Agreed, it is a flaw of the article, but I think their point is still correct (that we should all stand for something beyond what is easiest for us and not use incentives as a free pass for everything).
I usually go around saying to anyone who will listen "incentives are dangerous". Like... you can't avoid them as people are sneaky bastards and will find what the incentives are even if you didn't design any on purpose, but you should be on the lookout always and be damn careful if you ever get the bad idea to introduce any.
I can't imagine having that kind of free time/boredom
You should be saying that at your job imo.
> I usually go around saying to anyone who will listen "incentives are dangerous".
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
> the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net
Not really. If you go back in history, many figures did not have the capital / social safety net to follow their principles. Diogenes comes to mind. Buddha shunned his princely life. Epicurus. The OP did not say it would be easy.
Buddha was as you say a prince, renouncing wealth is a move only available to someone who has wealth, and he could have gone back.
Epicurus owned a garden and the leisure to sit in it.
Diogenes I can kind of buy about but he still lived off a slave-owning city that had surplus to spare.
Also none of them had kids or other dependents to take care of.
We have more food surplus now than ever before. But we also have more distractions than ever before.
Buddha: he survived without a safety net, that's my point.
Having kids and dependents makes it harder, but not impossible. You may have to leave them. Again, OP never said it would be easy.
Jobs are the simplest and most striking example of incentives. "Do this and you will get money, which you can spend on food and shelter".
Where a person living in abundance can choose to ignore monetary incentives, most people cannot. If you want to make behavior X be what a broad selection of people do, the only available way today is incentives. And a lot of problems we face today are exactly this sort of collective action problem - recycle, vote for good leaders, don't shit in the well.
Yes, it would be better that we lived in a world where most people were not "losers" (I.E. needs to work for money), but we're certainly not there yet.
The exchange of labor for money will never outpace its own absurdity to become a natural law.
We literally live in that world
The real natural law is scarcity.
We will always need a system to decide who gets to live by the ocean better than the default one, violence.
> The real natural law is scarcity.
That's the biggest myth of economics. It wasn't even true the pre-modern world except occasionally (famines were a real thing, but they were still kinda infrequent), and it's pretty much never true in an industrial civilization, let alone in an era of growing automation capabilities.
If resources are not scarce in industrial civilisation, why do you suppose people pay for them? Why is there a spot oil market, if oil is not scarce? And the same for all other commodities...
Yeah, most modern scarcity is artificially induced by producers, who will limit their supply to ensure their margins stay healthy.
However, land is one case where they aren’t making more of it. So, you are both right?
What does this mean
The game theorists/economists have studied this stuff in depth under the rubric of "mechanism design" or "market design". The relevant concept is "incentive compatibility" where the agents in the system do the right thing (whatever that was intended to be/designed for) because any deviation from that costs them more than playing nice.
The Wikipedia article [0] is not yet great but does give the two classic examples of "second-price auctions and a simple majority vote between two choices". The Gibbard–Satterthwaite shows the difficulty in extending this to more choices (in that Arrow's theorem sort of way).
The best thing I've read on this stuff is Alvin Roth's "Who Gets What and Why" (2015) [1] which is worth a read in any case. Repugnant markets!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_E._Roth#Market_design
There’s no guarantee more general results exist. It’s likely that any sufficiently complex “market” admits no incentive compatibility.
My experience tring to map game theory to people's choices in the workplace is that the action taken is typically opposite of the predicted, or optimal, 'game theoretic' action, and often with enormous benefit to that individual.
Reality never fails to amuse, especially when it’s peoples pet ideas.
I remember this book: Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn
"The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train a family pet. The quick fix of rewards may seem to be effective, but manipulating people with external incentives actually kills their interest in what they are doing and lowers the quality of their work."
Thanks to something (possibly the ruinous adhd medication regime I went through for my entire childhood) I don't really get any motivation from promises of carrots, only the sticks I try to avoid. Works great though, not unhappy, because doing good work still intrinsically satisfies me. I just really don't care about pleasing people (and yet I often do)
You might want to look into the difference between : positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and type 1/2 punishments.
I never was medicated for anything, yet I still couldn't ever bring myself to care for "rewards". But then the "rewards" in childhood were kinda pointless. Like a good grade. Can't buy anything with a good grade, so what does it matter?
I've found myself caring more for video game worlds, since there's a sense of progress coupled with useful rewards in the context of what you are doing. There never was a reward in school that made school work easier.
Videogames--and later making / changing them--was my jam growing up. Unlike people who may emotionally hurt you (or you them), games and machines are controllable and predictable. Even multi-player gaming had more feeling of control than messy reality.
School by comparison was usually heavily regimented and too abstract for me. Thankfully higher grades in my district granted more and more choices and autonomy.
We should stop paying people for work, that's also an incentive.
> My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed
One individual can ignore incentives. The point of that diagnosis is that you can't build a system on the premise that most people will behave well despite incentives, because many won't. It's a point about systems, not individuals.
It's worth thinking about incentives from the standpoint of feedback control theory. Typically, you have an input, an output, a measurement of the output, and an output goal. There is some lag between the input and the output, and there may be lag between the output and the measurement of the output used to drive the controller. The output will oscillate somewhat, more if there is more lag. Too much lag will result in oscillation so bad that convergence never happens. Much of classic control theory is devoted to understanding when that will happen and what to do about it.
Incentive systems often suffer from error and excessive lag between the output and the measurement of the output. This is a known problem in quality control. See Deming, the Toyota Production System, and continuous improvement. Even if you're measuring the desired output in a reasonable way, lag in that measurement will cause oscillation, and may prevent convergence. School grades and work performance reviews are examples of systems with high lag between output and the measurement of output. That happens even if the metrics are good, but not immediate.
If the measurement method is noisy, it may have to be filtered before use. This adds to lag. (Think about how a trailing moving average works.) Many incentive systems also have that property. School tests are intermittent noisy measurements filtered out by averaging.
These are known problems with incentive systems, but not well-known problems. Even if you're measuring the right thing, you can hit these problems.
I suspect that the author and many of the commenters have experienced the "bad project manager" effect.
MANY people have dealt with terrible project managers and therefore assume all project managers are bad. This is because great project managers are very rare.
The same is true about incentive schemes. Most of them are improperly designed and/or get hit by Goodheart's law. [0]
As a counter point, this article [1] about designing incentives for farm labor is excellent and shows that with careful thought, incentives can dramatically increase output.
I've also been reading Deming's last book [2] and he is VERY against sales commissions. Some of this is probably bad design (e.g. 100% of the commissions for a sale go to one person) but I do feel he makes a valid point that everyone at a firm should benefit from helping the customer. Highly recommend it as an alternative to the more mainstream business books.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
1 - https://archive.is/https://slate.com/culture/2008/08/an-amaz...
2 - https://amzn.to/4wfAAjU
> In the eternal game of cat and mouse between the goodhearted people trying to fix the incentives and the Goodhart’d people trying to exploit the incentives, I am rooting for the cats.
What lovely writing.
His rhetorical "Who could disagree that incentives causes bad behavior?" resolves, in reality, to a shockingly large number of real people. This is fundamentally why I do not share the author's gripe, even if it might be technically true.
The pathologies in our collective decision making at the political level caused by the inability of so many people to give credence to the power of incentives is the problem that needs to be solved, even if, in the author's weird online niche composed of a few thousand people, incentives are occasionally wrongly taken as a moral justification for bad behavior.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious parallels to Nietzsche's idea of the "superman", a person who will not bow to incentives but make their own value structure.
To me the analogy of the monstrous fish is also very reminiscent of Nietzsche's story in "the gay science" of the madman exclaiming in horror at the public square:
> "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"
Realising this horrid truth opens an opportunity to defy the structure of society and follow one's own convictions.
But as augment_me says above, not everyone can bear the cost of ignoring incentives. I think all of us have stories where we had a good conception of what the right thing was, and wanted to do the right thing, but money trouble or job security meant we had to follow bad incentives- I certainly do.
In a conversation about careers, a friend of mine casually dropped a simple approach to life that has helped me a lot: you can’t have everything all the time, so make the best of what you got. Some years you will have health and knowledge but be poor, others years you will build wealth but may not be able to uphold your moral values, etc.
I may not have the luxury to ignore bad incentives right now, but I try to make lemonade from the lemons life throws at me so that one day I can.
The idea of designing incentives far less useful social scientists and policy wonks we're hoping circa 2010.
I agree with and enjoy the overall sentiment of this piece. Incentive are fit losers. BYO incentives is the way to go.
That said, IRL, the structural advantage of external incentives... especially artificially designed ones... Can be near impossible to overcome.
Let's say you are a researcher working in one of the fields tested by 21st century mushiness. Replication failures. P-hacking. An unstructured stream of published research adding up to noise.
This outcome is not just because of publish-or-perish, or other incentive structure. It's also because the field is just hard. Harder than it seems it should be, intuitively.
It seems like science should have uncovered a decent, workable "theory of nutrition" or a promising pathway to one. It hasn't. That means thousands of researchers are working in their little corners... And when they look up from their desk there is no big picture forming. No big project that they are contributing to.
Maybe we just need a new theory, when you research methods.. or something. But... we don't know what that is.
Intrinsic motivation vs academic grind... Facing a near impossible challenge. A good chance of modest success within the pigeon-incetives paradigm... Vs near-guaranteed failure of an alternative, intrinsic motivation path.
Even if you take the intrinsic motivation path... There will probably come a point where you have invested years, achieve nothing... and proudly refusing to publish banal papers like everyone else will seem like folley. This person probably just leaves the field.
Startups are different than the corporations they become. 19th century science is different to modern academia. Trying to replicate qualities is always sysephean.
> We can all agree: the incentives are bad.
No, we don't.
> Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing.
And, people are also being rewarded for doing the right thing. Don't conflate the two.
Just because some incentives are rewarding the wrong behavior doesn't invalidate the concept. We're surrounded by incentives at work in every part of our life.
Fiat money only works because we are incentivized to believe in it.
Democracy works because we're mostly incentivized to support it.
Governments, countries, companies, parks, global trade, science, and shipping only work because of the complex web of positive and negative incentives we've built up to support them. They're not perfect, and never will be. And they also shouldn't be perfect (despite our natural inclination to want the "perfect"). The worst atrocities humankind has seen were driven by the pursuit of perfection and purity.
The cobra effect is what happens when you choose your incentives poorly. That's not a fault of the concept.
>My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. How could you be expected to break a rule, forego a promotion, or give up decimal of your grade point average, for the sake of—what? Doing the right thing?
But this misunderstands incentive based analysis.
The point isn't just that people naturally follow incentives, but that those who refuse are punished and no longer in a position to affect the world.
Taking a principled stand is great and all, but if the result is simply that you get fired and replaced by someone better at following orders, you didn't really fix the problem.
Of course it's more complicated than that. Certainly other people being willing to do evil is no excuse to do evil yourself. Maybe your principled stand inspires others and you start a revolution or something. But that's rare. In the average case incentives win. Which is why if you want to actually change the world for the better you should attack the incentives not the individuals - individuals can be replaced, but millions are willing to follow incentives.
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The rest of the article seems to be about developing your own morality, but morality is really just yet another incentive.
Maybe more succinctly: incentives work whether anyone cares or not, which is broadly the hallmark of good public policy. As foolish as relying on heroism in technology, so too is relying on perfect behavior from the citizenry in government.
I think your comment is describing something slightly different from incentives: the criteria for granting power and control to some individuals rather than others. There may be incentives to do what's necessary to fulfill those criteria, but it's a different axis from the incentives themselves.
Responding to the actual article: it seems like the author simply has a different set of values than what is assumed by the conventional incentives that he sees around him. If you choose your values then you can also choose your incentives.
I think you've written a good counterargument, but I disagree with your claim that "morality is really just yet another incentive". Incentives must be external.
Agreed, but I think some logic follows that as increasingly more incentives are needed then maybe people just don't have these principles. People seem to want it both ways—both to get the thing they want, but to be seen as not having taken it. To be seen as principled without standing for the principle. So we hear that taking a "principled stand is great and all, but". That line is right, it just implies the person doesn't believe that much in the principle.
Similar to the post, I find the discussion of incentives quite often ridiculous, as if no one ever does something because they want to do something nice. As Adam Smith said, "Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely". They don't just follow the incentives.
This article implies that there's no incentive to do the right thing. I don't think that's how the word works.
I might be nitpicking -- it makes a lot of good points -- but this is the key idea, and I think it's important to get it right.
I agree,
I also think it’s more like delayed gratification. Good incentives are for good people bad incentives are for fools. The further you can push back short-term incentives in favor of long-term, the better your life will be. Like we all “know” that love is better than coffee but in the morning many of us would/do choose coffee. Food, drugs, porn all short-term pleasures are “less good” than prosperity, but we often choose the quick dopamine hit over the long, difficult road
Curious, what do you mean with prosperity in this context?
I mean, tautologically, I guess all the good parts of prosperity and none of the bad. Not a proof of correctness but a list:
1. Wealth gotten by one’s own work, or by wise management 2. A lender never a borrower 3. Desires generally satisfied 4. Leaving an inheritance for children/future generations
I tend to think of the Kulaks that Trotsky wanted to work with but that Stalin sent to Siberia
Completely agree. Incentives are for the statistical masses.
As thinking individuals we can and should use our awareness and courage to make biggest "good" choices we can bear to. We can't all be zero-waste vegan community organisers lobbying for renewables and free education/healthcare, but I doubt living life with the blinders on leads any kind of moral or spiritual growth or fulfilment either.
> As thinking individuals we can and should use our awareness and courage to make biggest "good" choices we can bear to.
That’s the cool thing about incentives, we follow them whether we realize it or not. “bear to” is where the incentives are hiding. We don’t make the best choices, we choose from the choices available to us.
You can’t fight your environment forever.
If the gooder choice is 50km away and the bad choice is down the street, eventually you’ll stop going 50km out of your way every day because it’s just too cumbersome. You might even do it “just this once” because you had a busy day and your kid is crying and you’re just so tired and then before you know it, it’s been months or even years since the last time you did the cumbersome better thing.
I'm proud to say that I am person number 1089456347 who is not part of the statistical masses.
Incentives are also for when a principal just doesn't care about the difference between two possible choices. But maybe other people indirectly do, and an incentive like price can weigh the scales so that people indifferent to the choice choose the right one.
> We can't all be zero-waste vegan community organisers lobbying for renewables and free education/healthcare
Why? If you genuinely believe these things righteous and important why can’t everyone do them?
Perhaps because you’re incentivised not to: it’s a waste of your time, someone else can do your share of the campaigning, non-vegan food tastes great etc..
This is exactly how incentives work, not some spineless person in a dark room saying “yes m’lord I’ll torture another child for an extra nickel” as the article portrays.
I can’t totally tell if this is satire but we are all subject to incentives, even if (especially if?) we are aware of it.
It's not satire. They just really wanted to tell us all how very, very special they are, not one of the little people...sorry...statistical masses. Someone never got over reading Atlas Shrugged.
The satisfaction and feeling of superiority that comes from knowing that you did the right thing despite incentives to the contrary, in fact, is a very potent incentive in itself. You can totally get addicted to it.
This makes the theory of incentives unfalsifiable, which tracks with how people talk about it.
> Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing.
I like the article overall but this part seems overly uncharitable. I think the next step of your development would be to have your own incentives without looking down on other's who you think lack their own. You should be able to know who you are without shitting on others.
What comes after that?
Does something need to?
I loved this. Unfortunately, I don't know how realistic it is at this point. The entire modern Western system is built on incentives, and it would require dramatically changing the social order and economic system.
I know it's kinda beside the point but I like incentives compared to hard rules as a policy measure. They are much more effective, less bureaucratic and easier to push through. They are like weights vs. booleans.
Don't like smoking? Try out right banning it. It's impossible. You have to fight the lobbyist, the addicted consumers, the workers employed by the industry, ... Slapping a tax on it is much easier. A soft NO that's giving everyone time to adjust.
The problem with "absolute" taxes (A fixed % of the price for everyone) is that they punish the poor but don't affect the rich, while most of the problems out there are caused by the rich, because they are more powerful. You don't care about a carbon tax on your extremely polluting plane tickets if this represents 0,01% of your revenue. One solution is to make the tax proportional to your revenue, like in Switzerland speed tickets are which means someone already got 1.7M fine from one over-speed limit driving. But then people will manage to lie about their revenue, as rich always do. Then you could say that it's linked to the person, not the money, so in France if you drive too fast your driving licence is suspended. But once again, that would completely destroy a poor person life, not being able to go to his job anymore, while a rich will be a bit annoyed but just pay a cab. It would be so much better if people were doing the right thing because they knew it is the right thing, instead of having to add incentive to push them to do so. Our planet is burning right now, that would be a good moment to act.
On the other hand, there are vastly fewer rich people than poor, so for many things it doesn't matter if they can pay the fine. If only millionaires were littering, the streets would be quite clean.
That's all nice on a theoretical but such ideas quickly fall flat in a world where corporations are owned by rich people and create pollution often whole countries are even unable to pull off, often completely unpunished often economically and politically ("we need more jobs") encouraged.
I think reducing individuals to two people whose only difference is wealth in respect to which goods they can buy is wrong when applied to real world societies in the same way that weather prognosis based on a very limited set of parameters is wrong.
Wealth is not a measure to pay just fines or good, but today effectively the approximation for power that individuals, groups of individuals or legal entities hold. And measuring wealth is a huge complex topic on its own which also makes the taxation topic very complicated.
I think that's a huge flaw in present day economical thought. X is good because it increases X/Y ignoring secondary effects. It's like predicting whether it will rain on a given day by just looking at which way the wind goes on your weather station. There is theoretical truth to it, but given both secondary effects and the rest of the world that you might completely ignore but might have complete or partial reversal effects.
And then you have various groups that anyway mess with the details of the rules and people that ignore them through various other means, like not getting caught.
Classic example is also "We raise taxes, because then the rich will go away" which ignores things from "the rich" potentially not giving you anything if they don't give you taxes and the fact that your country might be able to offer a bit more both as a living and a working place than the level of taxes. In fact there have been studies conducted and the reality is that it barely has an effect. Turns out that people don't just leave for paying something that might even indirectly benefit them. Just like if you are rich you probably don't care much if the price for base goods increases, because you might have way bigger incentives like being in a secure place, having a house and family at a place and your company currently running smoothly with no downtrend in sight.
You're assuming Homo Economicus - that people evaluate the risk/reward before littering.
Another example: In Germany the chancellor decided that workers take too much "sick leave". Fair enough (probably) but they decided to clamp down on it by requiring a doctor's certificate from day one. Rookie mistake! For the doctors it piles on extra bureaucracy. Everyone who's actually sick is either miserable waiting in a doctor's office just to get some paperwork done or picks the lesser evil and goes to work sick where they infect the remaining colleagues.
An incentive based solution is: reduced pay on sick days. With _no pay_ you get sick people at work. With _full pay_ you get healthy people at home. With _reduced pay_ you can find a sweet spot. That adds no bureaucracy for doctors. For employers there is some but it directly translates into cost savings.
If I've got told, "oh btw, when you are sick you only get 70% of your wage" my risk management system would go full alarm mode. That's a risk I wouldn't want to take on me.
However whatever Germany is doing right now definitely isn't the way to to either.
Well, what do you expect from electing politicians who trust nobody and believe everyone's lying for money?
I've heard that doctors now issue at least 5-day sick notes even for the most minor thing, so his policy for forcing people to go to work has backfired.
Sounds great mate, come to Australia! [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/three-things-australia-must-do-t...
Fair enough but cutting the tax is another incentive measure: make the legal way to buy cigarettes the cheapest way. As the article states: the fact illicit tobacco is illegal does not prevent it and poses massive enforcement costs.
> This is a useful metaphor, because I think at the center of everyone’s psyche is some version of the Big Horrible Fish: some unexamined assumption that, if you fully considered it, would require you to upend a significant portion of your life.
This ties in with the Mental Immune System, and the Emotional Cost theory of perception.
Kudos for the fish analogy though, that's much better.
This might be decent advise on an individual level, but "just be virtuous" is no basis for government or company policy (which is what discussions about incentives usually revolve around, I've never seen "I was just following the incentives" used as an excuse for anything).
'“People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?'
Since the author seems genuinely baffled, the answer is "because they are just bad people". They're bad people, nothing we can do will fix that they are bad people, it's so their fault, so there's no need to consider incentive structures or anything like that. They're just going to have to be better people and the things providing bad incentives have no fault or responsibility for the bad behavior and/or bad outcomes.
The sad and ugly truth is that there's is a certain amount of that in play in the real world. However if I could only pick one of the two extremes, "it's all incentives" works be the more productive one. It's not the whole truth but I do think it is substantially closer than the other extreme.
Incentives are about tricking the selfish side of people into doing things that are valuable for others, which can be an incredibly powerful force, but it’s not the only way to get people to do things, and it’s not okay to be absolutely selfish and outsource your responsibility to the system.
I wonder what incentives drove the writing of this article.
Experimental History is one of those few blogs that are a guaranteed read for me. I'll make time in the morning to read whatever he publishes. Thank you for sharing!
You probably already knows this, but he also publishes them as a podcast where he reads the essay in one take.
On the moral front, see The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt (2013). This has a nice analysis of why different people think about ethics quite differently. Haidt looks at axes of morality - Harm, Tradition, Obedience to Authority, and two others. He points out that how people weight those axes differs widely. People in developed countries with some education tend to weigh Harm much higher than the other axes. Agricultural societies weigh Tradition and Obedience to Authority more.
This is a key difference between Left and Right in the US. (He's writing before Trump, notice.) Once you see this, it's obvious. Strongly recommend the book.
That makes perfect sense - the less you are able to assess "harm" for yourself (because you are not educated or worldly) the more you should rely on external cultural consensus.
Incentives are important for allocative efficiency, whether that be the price of a banana or the incentive to do a job that pays more. Of course, they're imperfect and there are some cases where incentives lead to rent-seeking rather than genuinely economic efficiency. And there is often a divergence between private value and social value. But these are exceptions to the rule. If everyone ignored price signals, society would be less well off.
This doesn't mean we should all attempt to do the highest possible paying job available to us, but it does mean there's a genuine loss to society if (say) a high paid software engineer decides to quit and start a bike repair shop i.e. the economic pie will be smaller an so will the tax base. So when making the decision we should at least be conscious of this.
As an economist, I do kind of agree with the premise of the article, but in a different way. As consumers in particular, we can do much better than following incentives.
For instance, we can use the car less, even if it's a bit inconvenient. It's much nicer to see more people out walking, on their bikes or on the bus, leads to less noise and congestion. So there's a positive externality. Or I could buy a smaller car, even though bigger one is more convenient.
Similarly, if you're lucky enough to have a high paying job, you can buy all sorts of status symbols. Or, you could choose to consume less than you earn, and give the difference to charity, or invest in something of social value.
Whether you agree with this or not, economic theory provides a clear framework to think about all of this, both the price signal and the difference between private and social incentives. What bothers me (as the article touches on) is that people often have a simplified view of economics which is essentially that 'market incentives and price signals broadly lead to good outcomes (or at least, better outcomes than communism!), and therefore economics always morally endorses buying things at market prices'. There's nothing in economic theory that says that spending £50k more on a car because it's got a fancier brand is a reasonable moral choice.
As someone who has helped drug addicts in an organisation called "Proyecto Hombre" in Spain you probably don't understand how hard is to help someone in this situation and that sometimes you CAN'T.
It is very typical that when someone gets on drugs even the father of the person stops trying to help after several failed trials. Only the mothers stay. And it is so painful to watch. The kind of abuses mothers tolerate from their children.
Substances destroys the typical regulating behaviour of the brain. They literally can't see the harm they do to others. You usually can't help them until they hit rock bottom and open a window for you to intervene.
For helping you need knowledge and training and "trying to help" without it could do more harm than good.
About the moral obligation to help the drug addicts, as "social justice", I would call this "injustice". Here is the typical situation: Someone takes drugs in a social group because is "cool". In the same group there is someone that decides not to take them. He is humiliated by the group and it takes a lot of work. One of the members of the group gets addicted, do terrible things and asks for help.
It is usual that the one that did not take drugs, or the brother in the family ask the question "why are you helping this person that decided to go this way herself?" "Why are you expending like 10x more resources in this person that did everything wrong than in me when did everything well (studied instead of earning easy money selling drugs, that had to withstand the pressure and humiliations by the group).
Drugs are super expensive and addicts will do anything to get their dose, supporting the addicts usually takes all the resources from a family, neglecting the resources to other members of the family. If the State provides the support, the same thing happens. Should the State spend exorbitant resources that the rest of the society has to pay taking the resources from everyone that needs them?
I only do what is unrewarding at the most fundamental level.
This article reflects my values and philosophy exactly... However I think the author is underestimating the cost of not following incentives. It's torture.
In this society, I'm a loser precisely because I ignored incentives. I think we live in a failed society so I don't mind that much being a loser in such society. I don't think I would feel any pride being a winner... However, I would very much appreciate the financial comfort of not having to participate in it! So that would be the advantage of being a winner.
It's the great irony; the winners who have the option to not participate, want to participate... And the losers who ignore incentives find that they are forced to participate sooner or later!
Right now I think my current job is probably unethical. Though most people would probably not think so. They just didn't look for the devil in the details.
Most people are lucky to have been following incentives subconsciously, believing that incentives align with economic efficiency and, therefore, moral virtue. I was not so lucky to believe that. Now I have to do stuff that I know to be unethical to free myself. Is this the definition of corruption? Isn't it a worse form of corruption if you don't even bother trying to understand the impact of what you're doing? Or worse, you deceive yourself?
Oh what a relief to finally read a non-LLM-generated article. The creative expressions in it are tickling my brain
I think as a culture, we teach the wrong things to kids.
1) Bribe/corruption is okay: Do this (eat broccoli, finish homework, etc) and I'll give you an incentive/bribe (candy, play time, screen time).
2) Magic: Kids are scientific and curious, they ask millions of questions. Explain everything away by magic (fairytales), religion, god, govt, economics, etc. Nobody has the knowledge or patience to deal with the continuous stream of questions.
We train kids to accept these things as defaults of culture.
The only parent that comes to mind who seems to have understood this is Richard Feynman's dad who taught him to think like a scientist, question authority, etc: https://www.wondersofphysics.com/2021/06/what-did-feynman-le...
I wouldn't conflate bribe/coruption with payment.
As far as 2) goes, I don't think that is actually true. Sometimes people don't have time for children's questions, but when a child asks why summer is different than winter nobody in modern times says because Demeter is sad about the rape of her daughter.
what alternative are people proposing?
I think implicit in this argument is a proposal that society stops making excuses for anti-social people and behavior, and shames them and their behavior instead. Ironically, this is just a different incentive system! But IMO that doesn't make the argument less correct. It is a more full realization that "people respond to incentives", including shame.
develop or rediscover a culture that views people as possessing inherent dignity, reason, empathy and individual freedom instead of promoting a commercial culture whose logical terminus are the Wall-E people.[1]
Practical first step would be to return to Humboldt's model of education[2] and to not devalue to arts and humanities at every opportunity.
[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Yw7WAq_GZY8/hqdefault.jpg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
> develop or rediscover a culture that views people as possessing inherent dignity, reason, empathy and individual freedom
But you don't have to wait for the entire world to change for you to treat the people around you this way.
And thankfully millions of people are already doing it. But the good of small actions from normal people is in the balance with the evil of terrible actions from powerful people, the last example being the current president of the US.
So the message of it is - "if people have a lot of agency because they have liquid capital and network that allows them to not give a shit about incentives, they usually behave better and create more valuable stuff for society"? I agree with it. But this is almost an uncomfortably far-right take, because this is same as claiming that systemic, generational inequality is a virtue.
Evolution is incentives.
Even if you think you cannot escape incentives - there exists a thing for shaping them - it is called "regulation". Some still consider it a dirty word though.
Very good write-up and connects to a lot of ideas I've been working through.
First I completely agree with the author that you have to "bring your own incentives" instead of trying to discern them from the environment. In fact conversation is often confused when people just try to figure out the incentive structure.
Consider this most existential topic - whether an individual (and therefore society) is capable of producing children. On the "no" side you are readily supplied with a list of incentive-shaped rationalization: eg it's too expensive, climate change, etc. On the "yes" side people just aren't evaluating those dis-incentives - they come in with a value-based motivation (children are important, children are the future) and act of out that - with the "obstacles" being something to overcome not something to base the decision on.
So that's an example of where coming with your own incentives is key. Existentially.
On the other hand aligned incentives matter. For example when I was growing up I was "academically and engineering minded" which is that I enjoyed useful learning and demonstrating knowledge through practical application. And luckily both my family and most teachers gave good vibes about this in return. I'm sure that helped.
So maybe the most critical thing is to bring your own incentives but the second most critical thing is that they align. For example, I bring a high-ownership perspective to my job - which basically means I try to do what's actually most existential or strategic for the business. I just wrapped up 4 years in a FAANG where the incentives were aligned very much away from that, to the point where a VP had to tell me that she could only reward me for things that aligned specifically to my role profile, not for reaching out beyond the role to actually move the needle (btw totally understandable why big companies have to operate that way - but an example where "good" and "incentive" were not aligned.)
So I was faced with a choice - "die on the hill" for what I know is right, or follow the incentive structure. What did I actually do? Bail for a smaller company where I routinely work with the CEO and senior leadership directly and there's no gap between "what's right for the business" and "what I should be doing"
So still being your own incentives is key - but secondarily you (a) want to be in a place whose incentives reflect what you think is right already and (b) create such an environment for the kind of people you want to be and work with.
As an analogy you want to have your own compass for where you want to go. But ideally the wind and the tides are helping you go in that direction. But shoueknthe winds and tides shift your direction doesn't. Or shouldn't. Back to my first example, think about all the people who are chosing to not have a family just because it's not enough vogue today and there's no peer pressure. It's a sort of self-contained extinction event because someone doesn't have the instinct to fight that momentum. I use this example because it's hard to think of something more existential.
> A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose.
This is actually a fairly recent concept.
For a long time, humans across the globe have believed that life had a purpose, but until the 18th and 19th centuries, the belief was more or less that the purpose was dictated by God, the universe, etc. That there was a purpose that applied to everyone, not that everyone had to find his or her own purpose.
> That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong.
The problem with this is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well-meaning people who believe strongly that they are increasing the right and decreasing the wrong are capable of creating many problems. And sometimes, you get really sick people who think they're well-meaning and their "right" is everyone else's "wrong".
> But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.
I'm personally not a fan of the Elons and Zucks of the world, but going around categorizing people into groups like "spiritually chinless, passionless, purpose-lacking sniveling little twerps who only care about getting ahead" probably isn't healthy.
Has the author considered that many of these people simply have beliefs, passions, purposes that don't align with his and that, if asked, they might speak poorly of his beliefs, passions, purposes?
We can debate whether or not these people are, in the final analysis, ethical, but I don't think reducing them to this helps the author's argument.
> Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to?
Most people in this world don't have the luxury of sitting around and figuring out all of the world's mysteries and solving all of the world's problem.
> I saw my fish in 2020 in San Fransisco, during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.5 Inside the conference hotel were dozens of talks about stereotyping, prejudice, inequality, and so on. That had never struck me as strange until that year, when outside of the hotel, which was in the middle of SF’s Tenderloin district, people were sprawled out on the sidewalk, dying of overdoses. Scholars were scurrying past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is ironic because “scholars will scurry past homeless people to give talks on social justice” is literally the main finding from one of the most famous psychology studies of all time.
The author paints his experience as some sort of Siddhartha-like epiphany. The reality is that lots of people have seen what the author saw, and worse. Any many were affected by it. But just because they didn't stop and play Jesus (which the author apparently didn't do either) doesn't mean that they didn't notice and weren't affected.
The author seems to be assuming that he's one of the few people who isn't oblivious.
> When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered. They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance to forge their own values.
Like what? The article is really lacking in specifics and it seems like it's a reflection of the author's experience and views, which he projects onto the other 8 billion people on the planet.
In my own experience, which includes having emigrated from the US to another part of the world, most people are just trying to get through the day, pay their bills, provide for their families, find peace and contentment, etc. They're not morally-corrupt zombies who, at best, are oblivious to the suffering in the world or, at worst, bad apes chasing free bananas. They're just people who don't have any illusions that their lives and powers are bigger than they really are.
I think the point is, society is trying to maximize wealth instead of maximizing happiness and fulfilment. We are being told that to be successful is to be rich, while we should be told that to be successful is to be happy. And the reason is that you don't need much to be happy. So the day we say this to the citizens, the day we all realize buying things is useless, the whole economic system collapses, and no one wants to be in charge during the very hard transition period between the two systems. The interesting thing is, because the planet has limited resources, because we don't take care of it and because we don't control wealth inequality, the switch will happen, unplanified, and millions (billions?) of humans will die.
That's not the post that the author made.
> This is actually a fairly recent concept.
Whether people think it's God dictated or it's self invented, sounds to me like people acquire purpose.
There's a difference between being born into a world where you are taught you have a purpose defined by God, the universe, etc., and being born into a culture where you are taught you need to find your own purpose.
It's both. You have a purpose defined by God, but you have to understand what it is and the journey is your own. There are a lot of hints, explanations, personal stories, but you have to do some work to understand what they mean.
The historical evidence is pretty clear that the modern idea you have a unique purpose you need to find for yourself started to become common in the 18th and 19th centuries. Before that, purpose was largely a dictate cast upon all members of the society.
That feels like an incredibly modern view.
You're not disagreeing. They're different ways of acquiring a purpose but they're both acquiring a purpose.
This seems to misrepresent what incentives are: latent unobservable things. Incentives are not what you or anyone else says they are. It makes sense to simply state the incentives in academic games which are of course useful at times.
So the author is making some point about wrong incentive models and meta models.
Disagree
Very few people are self starters, I’ve become fixated on increasing the productivity of the population. Anyone excluded or encumbered has things to address why that is, and then add them to the productivity machine. At one point women weren’t included, other marginalized people are excluded, some populations have a tendency to suicide unless we affirm their feelings and then they are productive. All of that fits within my philosophy and makes the tweaks to the workflow easy adopt, if it means more people are included in the productivity engine.
Most of the comments are one level deeper “lets condition all of society to be self starters” with no proposal on how to do so
Incentives it is
But productive to build what? Is productivity what makes people happy and fulfilled?
the economy, its a resource allocation system, the most efficient one concocted so far
people have to find their own purpose, partially enabled with the proceeds of their productivity, otherwise that’s not a problem being solved for
Well, this is just silly.
"We can all agree: the incentives are bad."
Seriously?!
If I kill someone, or behave like an asshole, everyone will hate me, so I've got an incentive not to. Is that so horrible?
The reason that people talk about incentives when it comes to politics is that laws and large parts of present day's richer countries economic systems are controlled by laws, contracts, associations between countries, companies, people, etc. and are an artificially created ruleset. That means if you change rules you change incentives. Eg. if you know a government will bail you out, you lose the incentive to avoid risky things, if there is a tax on something you are it will influence your monetary incentives, if being an asshole is looked upon favorably then you have an incentive to be one. Also if tax fraud isn't considered a crime by large parts of people or is seen as smart then you have an incentive to commit it.
A lot of social change good and bad came from shifts in good and bad incentives.
Even more. If you look at the legal and prison systems in Norway vs eg the US the incentives that individuals, governments and corporations have are a reason for a 5 year recidivism rate of 70% vs 20%.
In general if you think your life will be better as a criminal than the alternative then you will be incentivized become one. If you can choose between joining the mafia that might even care for you or barely getting through with day jobs then you are incentivized to do so.
So if a government manages to make sure your life will certainly better, than the incentive to join is a whole lot lower.
If you are shamed vs praised (or otherwise feel supported) for sexism or racism you will have an incentive to go a certain way.
Cults and so on used incentives in a bad way, many parents use incentives in a good way ("if you clean up your room/finish your homework/behave you'll get ice cream later").
The reason people talk about incentives is because they shape whether things are likely to work out. As we've seen big public companies usually will do everything they can get away with and will break laws if the expected profit is higher than the potential fine. That is a wrong and very much changeable incentive.
And it doesn't have to be laws. It can be public opinion. If the marketing is more expensive than just not doing a bad thing in first place then that's an incentive as well.
Incentives are the things that make people do things good and bad. Incentives are the reason people go out of bed and be it just the incentive to ease the pressure on their full bladder. And even there if getting up will cost you great pain you might have a higher incentive there.
Just like people going to doctors is often dominated by incentives of getting rid of a sickness vs not having to pay money or endure a potentially painful or side effect rich treatment.
<3 this so much
Idiotic article
> then you’re a dummy and a schmuck
Who cares what names you call. I would be more powerful and comfortable in this world. While you spend your time calling names that would have zero effect in this world. You would be like a donkey who cries its lust away. Sounds like a total loser to me..
There's certainly a grain of truth, but there's also a lot of idealism and naivete.
First, there's the false dichotomy. Only psychopaths do things purely and only for the incentives. Others modify their behavior in incentive optimizing ways, but within the constraints of what they think are right and wrong.
The author brings the confidence of the newly religious. They have found some great truth, seem the great fish, and now anyone else who has not reached this acceptable level of fervor is, in their words, a loser. Perhaps the fish the author has seen is also not that great? Compared to the vastness of the ocean? And they just haven't seen one of the many even bigger fish yet? And then may someday realize that all fish look different to all people and some people have found their fish and it's different from your fish, it may even look not that great to you, but what matters is how it looks to the beholder.
What is the author even arguing for? Because it comes off as "care more".
Sorry OP, I stopped reading when I saw it was Substack. I won't subject myself to hostile UX, no matter the content.
The premise of this article only works because the author has taken an overly narrow definition of an 'incentive' - as if an incentive can only be offered by a social media app for a quick dopamine hit.
What's they are missing is that it's all incentives, all the way down. You want to be a good kind person? You feel good when you believe you've demonstrated this - but you're just acting on incentives you've set for yourself to feel good. You want to feel morally superior by quitting social media (thereby avoiding the overt incentives to the contrary) or donating more to charity? Same thing - you're following incentives you've created for yourself to be the person you want to be and be seen as.
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Also, FWIW, I strongly disliked the mid-article moralisation - implying that people are somehow flawed, inferior individuals if they haven't examined every aspect of their world and developed a deep understanding of it that could never be challenged. This is just a self-serving conceit of someone who feels superior because they think they see the matrix (or fish). The world is full of people who live their lives as best they can, trying to be decent people as best they can, without having the time, energy, or incentive to dive deeper into things as the author seems to believe they should. Are they inferior people? No. So f#ck this author and their snide superior moralistic b#llshit.
> without having the time, energy, or incentive to dive deeper into things
I don't think anyone would disagree that survival comes first. But for those who do have the time/energy/money to dive deeper into things, and intentionally choose not to... those people may be worthy of our contempt
> But for those who do have the time/energy/money to dive deeper into things, and intentionally choose not to... those people may be worthy of our contempt
Feels like an intellectual puritanism. Of course you must spend your time not on frivolities but solely on mind-expanding pursuits...
If you've never been to a big music festival because you are busy designing a programming language you are not expanding your mind. Both are needed.
Totally, it all comes to incentives. People just choose which poison to take.