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Incentives are for losers

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Re: Incentives are for losers

#21

Post by ElProlactin »

Barrin92 wrote: post #12
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #7

what alternative are people proposing?

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.…

> 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.

Re: Incentives are for losers

#22

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

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.

Re: Incentives are for losers

#23

Post by laserlight »

ElProlactin wrote: post #18

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Incentives are for losers

#24

Post by ElProlactin »

laserlight wrote: post #23
ElProlactin wrote: post #18

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Incentives are for losers

#25

Post by boxed »

augment_me wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Incentives are for losers

#27

Post by jongjong »

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?

Re: Incentives are for losers

#28

Post by ngruhn »

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.

Re: Incentives are for losers

#29

Post by [deleted] »

bawolff wrote: post #2

>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 n…

[deleted]

Re: Incentives are for losers

#30

Post by discarded1023 »

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

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