michael_nielsen

I wrote the above with a little snark, which I really don't like in myself. But that was one immensely frustrating conversation.

It was a person who, AFAICT, could no longer even see non-incentive based behaviours, at least in some spheres. My idea that some people wrote Wikipedia because it was such enormous fun was simply dismissed as totally implausible. Grr.

(Add the caveat that it was a rapid-fire conversation, after a talk, which means I may well have misunderstood, we may have been talking past one another, etc. But I don't think so. And certainly there do seem to be people whose main model is people responding to incentives...)

Related annoyance: human decisions interpreted universally as attempts to "signal" or "gain status". Yeah, definitely can play a role, sometimes large, sometimes small. But as a universal theory of behaviour, yikes!

I had a shift somewhere in the last few months, not sure what triggered it, but it was something like "assume that everything an academic / philosopher / etc. says about people in general is just a description of themselves in particular."