Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- >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.
-----
The rest of the article seems to be about developing your own morality, but morality is really just yet another incentive.
by bawolff - 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.by cm11
- 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.by Reubend
- 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.
by neerajsi - 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.by jaggederest
- 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
by samirillian - Curious, what do you mean with prosperity in this context?
- 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.
by energy123 - 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?
by jongjong - > 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.
by nerdsniper - 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.
by Animats - 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...
by alexpotato - > 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.
by gfrecvh - 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."
- We should stop paying people for work, that's also an incentive.by LunaSea
- 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)by rf15
- 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
- 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.
- There’s no guarantee more general results exist. It’s likely that any sufficiently complex “market” admits no incentive compatibility.
- 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.
by ball_of_lint - The exchange of labor for money will never outpace its own absurdity to become a natural law.
We literally live in that world
- 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.
by augment_me - > 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.
by rozumem - 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.by seles
- 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.by boxed
- 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.
by dchftcs - 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).
by shuwix