Incentives are for losers

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.

You should be saying that at your job imo.

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

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?

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.