81–90 of 129 posts
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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.
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.
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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…
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.
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…
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 sic…
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.
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> 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...
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 collectiv…
We literally live in that world
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 ourse…
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.
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".
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…
If you're already a winner you can escape from incentives. No contradiction.
> 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 ince…