Posted by bkudria 7 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
However whatever Germany is doing right now definitely isn't the way to to either.
[0] https://theconversation.com/three-things-australia-must-do-t...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
But you don't have to wait for the entire world to change for you to treat the people around you this way.
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?
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
Incentives it is
