Conversation

It’s not that incentives don’t work, it’s that there are more incentives in play in a complex system than you can dominate by design behaviors reveal landscape of incentives thinking designed incentives drive behaviors is a bit like thinking mountains will step aside for roads
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At best designed incentives can usefully perturb wild behaviors if you take the time to map their host landscape a bit Like how road builders survey land in laying out roads
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A particular problem with legible incentives is that they rapidly hit cognitive limits: accurate, rational computation of optimal response to incentives is for trading algos, not humans. Humans struggle to grok even simple shit like “pay off highest interest debt first”
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Replying to
Outside of algorithmic automation domains, most examples of incentives shaping live human behaviors involve large amounts of money and overlooked loopholes to game them efficiently. Goodhart’s law examples are more common than working-as-designed examples.
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Most incentives try to get humans to invest reasonable effort for fair rewards. Most humans only pay attention if there are unfair rewards. So you have to offer unfair rewards or penalties (“death for littering”) to shape behavior strongly enough to claim you’ve “designed” it
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Parkinson's law, goodhart's law. Markets still make these laws, but we can play with the markets and money and make more laws possible. Then it becomes a morality question because tail risk can be waved away. Moral jazard. You can make it simple with liabilities or it can.