michael_nielsen

Alas. Framing human decisions as responses to incentives is another harmful effect of utilitarianism, Bayesianism and utility theory in economics.https://twitter.com/MatjazLeonardis/status/1141070593149853696 …

Human decisions often really are responses to incentives (sometimes mainly, sometimes in part). But having that as the _only_ way of thinking about them is a terrible model.

I once had a conversation with an economist who was extremely puzzled about why people "volunteered free labor" to write Wikipedia articles. She had a lot to say about the costs, and wanted to think about reputational benefits etc.

I asked why she thought people played soccer in the park on the weekend, "volunteering free labor" to do so. And she started to talk about reputational benefits from friends watching etc. I proposed that maybe it might be "fun", but this was not considered plausible...