I feel like there's an important distinction missing here between artificially manufactured incentives and the sort of intrinsic incentives baked into various features of the universe. "Obeying" someone else's reward system that they created to get you to act a certain way is one thing, while living in accordance with what makes your body feel good and healthy is quite different
Perhaps the bifurcation you're looking for are incentives which self-stabilize towards an ideal state (where the pendulum can swing between hungry and full without much consequence) and incentives which have no negative feedback loop.
But this has me thinking... Habit formation operates as a positive feedback loop driven by incentives... and morals are very similar to habit: moral excellence is a state of character formed by repetition. I suppose this repetitive action could be turning down incentives but the choice to do so becomes itself a self-referential incentive if it becomes a habitual moral.
Wealth accumulation and optimization can occupy people's time like a cancer but what about moral accumulation? Chidi Anagonye? Maybe the important thing is to just find a median position in all things and explore the benefits of different points of view while also allocating enough time to ensure that you are managing your time well.
Yes yes I absolutely and massively agree --- IN the sphere of Very Important Things. However in every day bits and pieces I don't want to have to stop and think to reinvent the wheel for every little system. I kind of want other parts of the distributed specialized machine of Civilisation to have worked out things for me, things like traffic flows and crowd safety at stadiums. I want to be able to drift out half unaware and for the markings on the floor to direct me in a safe and convenient way. It would be good if I didn't have to go out of my way to do that. Seems like a similar concept
Your article has prompted me to explore writing a few essay length posts on Substack. I think the topic of incentives is more nuanced, depending on the scale of analysis, and definition.
From the first living cells to modern civilizations, incentives shape behavior by directing the flow of energy, information, and opportunity.
Biologically, incentives such as nutrients, reproduction, and survival drive adaptation, but can also promote competition, disease, and overconsumption.
Psychologically, curiosity, pleasure, meaning, and social approval motivate learning and creativity, yet they also fuel addiction, anxiety, and status-seeking.
Sociological incentives encourage trust, cooperation, and shared identity, while simultaneously enabling conformity, tribalism, and exclusion.
Economic incentives reward innovation, specialization, and productivity, but can amplify inequality, short-term thinking, and exploitation.
Political incentives coordinate collective action and protect public goods, yet they may also encourage polarization, bureaucratic self-preservation, and the pursuit of power over the common good.
Alex Wissner-Gross argues that intelligent systems tend to maximize future freedom of action—the diversity of options available.
Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle suggests that living systems persist by minimizing uncertainty while remaining adaptive.
Together, these perspectives reveal a fundamental tension: flourishing depends on balancing exploration with stability, expanding possibilities without sacrificing coherence.
Across every scale of life, healthy incentives increase both resilience and the capacity to create richer futures
I'd love to hear your thoughts on different kinds of incentives and the ways to work around them.
One distinction I wonder about is:
- "Hard" incentives: do good at a finance degree and you will very likely make concrete large sums of money which you can exchange for many other things.
- "Soft" incentives: become a good teacher and you will sometimes, unpredictably, and in ways largely non-transmutable to anything else, receive gratitude and enjoyment from having changed people's lives.
And I notice that while hard incentives for concrete money and power are a constant through history, the balance of that against soft incentives, and the particular soft incentives that are seen as most culturally desirable, change over time.
When we say "incentives are wrong" we often mean the former, and then have to decide whether to change the hard or the soft bit to fix things.
- Is politics bad because candidates can make way more money helping the bad guys, and the solution is to raise more money for the good guys? Or is the problem that society needs stronger journalism and a sense of imposed shame so people are more hesitant to publicly get paid to do bad things anymore.
- Would the best society be one in which teachers are paid better than bankers? Or one in which teachers are paid better than today, still less than bankers, but more reliably not yelled at by parents and administrators and held in higher social esteem? (In other words, where the punishment of hard incentives is less, but you still must desire the soft incentive to be willing to do it.)
For me the more useful distinction is less hard vs. soft and more chosen vs. unchosen. If you doing something for money, then what's the money for? Then what's that thing for, and so on, and whatever it's for ultimately, do you actually want that thing, and why? There will still be plenty of disagreements about value when we get to the bottom of things, but I don't think we often get to the bottom of things in the first place.
Also: per your previous post on people getting more boring, is the wealth of our society making incentives harder to not follow? e.g. the difference between being at the 5th percentile and the 50th percentile of wealth is much larger now than it was 100 years ago, does this mean a lot more people are competing for the same set of hard incentives, driving up the personal cost of failing to follow the structural incentives?
And can we distinguish "climbing the ladder" of incentives (blindly following the incentive gradient with no other purpose) versus "avoiding being pushed down the ladder" (trying to maintain a socio-economic status while also maximizing for some other goal)?
Yes, I think the rewards for conventionality have gone way up––this might almost be what development means in the first place, that the structures of society offer you a better deal than breaking all the rules.
I'm not sure if climbing vs. avoiding being pushed down itself makes a big difference. I think the active ingredient in the question you posed is whether you're serving the incentives as a mean to some other end or not.
Was also thinking about this - "positive" incentives (I get X) vs "negative" incentives (maybe more accurately called 'punishments'), and also the incentives of basic necessities (health insurance, housing, education) vs incentives like social or professional prestige, lots of money, etc. I still believe there are people who forsake basic necessities to do the right thing, but it's definitely much harder.
I can't remember who said it (I thought it was Eliezer Yudkowsky but I can't find any reference to it) but I have a vague memory of a quote to the effect of "integrity is acting one way when your incentives point in another"
Sure, but the model of “people act this way because of the incentives” is more useful than “most people are losers who won't do the right thing unless incentivized”
This doesn't compute for me. You're treating incentives as if they're toys in a Cracker Jacks box. I'm thinking about incentives like "I can pay my mortgage and car payments this month" or "I can avoid a a tax audit that'll probably end up shutting down my company" type incentives since those are the kind that real people have to negotiate in their lives.
I am pretty sure Adam is not arguing that incentives ought never be used or heeded, only that they ought never be allowed to be a “legitimate” excuse for very bad behaviors. As if the incentive were a command that cannot be disobeyed.
Especially those behaviors where the doer is fully aware that circumstances require better than base behavior from decent people. Behaving like a decent person means not choosing to accept an incentive to ruin someone’s day, or their future. Being a decent person is refusing to give in to one’s worst impulses just because “the incentives” are aligned with giving in.
Too often we hear that some company is ruining the local environment because the incentives are aligned with pollution: i.e. no legal punishments outweigh the cost/benefit of polluting. Thus they are not sufficiently incentivized to being a good corporate neighbor.
I want to talk about two related items in this post: (1) things-that-are-like-talking vs. things-that-are-like-reading; and (2) "we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken". Both of these feel to me very close to Daniel Kahneman's idea of System One vs. System Two thinking. System One is easy and natural and we love to do it, because it's easy, and also we're very good at it; but it relies on gut feelings and gets important things wrong a lot of the time; System Two is hard and difficult and we hate to do it and we're bad at it; we resist doing it until we're forced to.
Talking is easy and natural and System One. The moral/religious model of most people is System One. Relying on incentives to decide how to live your life is System One. All of it is, as you say, "for losers." (OK, talking in and of itself isn't for losers, but if you don't learn how to read....)
Anyway. I think all of this is basically correct and psychologically well-grounded.
If you don't want to be a loser, the next question is how to make yourself *see* that System One is failing you on a specific point. How to get past the easy answers provided by System One and make yourself buckle down and do some hard but necessary System Two thinking -- and, perhaps more importantly, how to know which aspects of your life require this buckling down (and which aspects you can coast for now). This piece mentions something about "seeing the fish" and I appreciate the metaphor and I sort of see what you're getting at (though some more examples would help). But my most important objection is that I don't know how one would operationalize it. "Seeing the fish" seems like something that just happens to you, rather than something you can intentionally do or learn to do better.
Put otherwise: backbone is a virtue, yes, but it's hardly the only virtue that matters. How do we cultivate the better kinds of intellectual habits; how do we get our children to do the same; etc. (Even posing these questions I suddenly feel a little bit like Aristotle.)
I'm still thinking about this––I'm not sure it's possible to go looking for fish, only to choose not to look away when you happen to encounter one. "Reconsider your fundamental assumptions" is a tall order, and perhaps an impossible one, without an inciting incident.
I have to disagree with the way you seem to draw lines around the concept of "incentive". Certainly, many (perhaps most) people hear "incentive" and think of money, power, fame, and status. But when you say this:
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?
you are ignoring the fact that people often have, historically, felt incentivized to do the right thing. In a less secular age, people would readily call to mind Matthew 6:20, where Jesus exhorted his followers to "store up treasures in heaven". What is that, if not an incentive toward doing the right thing in the here and now, with the idea of some type of reward in the hereafter?
Not all incentives are material, and not all people respond to the same incentives. But I believe that everyone responds to some kind of incentive. They are an inescapable feature of life. So no, incentives are not just for losers--what can make you a loser is the type of incentive you respond to, and how you respond to it.
This is the first time ever than I'm reading your work sir but your article hit home for me. My mind troubles with a similar problem...(Context: I was studying public policy). We had a conference on public policy and there were dignitaries and academics talking about policy and how things 'ought to be' in this world. We obviously had the best of amenities while we were attending these lectures; an AC room (it's hot in India), best stationery, best teachers where people were talking about poverty and how systems should be. It felt so so ironic that we were talking about people from the lower echelon of the society and we have never even spoken to them, never tried to understand what it is to be them...if you understand how I mean it. My mind was baffled and these questions still haunt me, that day was my 'fish.' These people who want to bring some change or work in public policy haven't encountered the real 'public' and their lives.
There are so many questions on philosophy that take a lot of space in my mind.
Thanku for this article..this is the first time in ever replying or even talking about thoughts like these. I hope you read my message :)
This is a great analogy: "incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you."
This is a great sentence: "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."
Thank you for sharing all of this, especially the story of Charles Sumner!
Wisconsin winter, walking out from Mass—one of the step-sleepers asked me “man it’s so cold, you got a blanket?”
Likely patting my coat, as I would had he asked for change—“nah I’m sorry I don’t.”
With the impatience of someone bone-cold and dealing with the umpteenth moron of the day, he said something to the effect of “no shit, Sherlock—would you go buy me one from that very visible and open Walgreens?”
I wandered the aisles in a fish-gazing haze, checked out, mumbled an apology as I handed him the bag and numbly hurried back to the parking garage and home. The memory embarrasses me still.
I'm not religious, but when I was younger I attended Quaker meetings for a few years. I've always respected the Quakers (that I met) because of the exceptionally strong sense of personal responsibility they all carried. This is an oversimplification, but I think they all preferred to "make better people" instead of trying to "make better systems." Doesn't matter how good your system is if the people running it (being run by it?) suck.
Fantastic article simply for the great debate it created, including being labeled a Communist (without any supporting evidence or explanation, which is so on brand for that kind of statement). And Mr. Eastwood *just* beat me in pointing out the lack of an apostrophe in Finnegans Wake.
I feel like there's an important distinction missing here between artificially manufactured incentives and the sort of intrinsic incentives baked into various features of the universe. "Obeying" someone else's reward system that they created to get you to act a certain way is one thing, while living in accordance with what makes your body feel good and healthy is quite different
Perhaps the bifurcation you're looking for are incentives which self-stabilize towards an ideal state (where the pendulum can swing between hungry and full without much consequence) and incentives which have no negative feedback loop.
But this has me thinking... Habit formation operates as a positive feedback loop driven by incentives... and morals are very similar to habit: moral excellence is a state of character formed by repetition. I suppose this repetitive action could be turning down incentives but the choice to do so becomes itself a self-referential incentive if it becomes a habitual moral.
Wealth accumulation and optimization can occupy people's time like a cancer but what about moral accumulation? Chidi Anagonye? Maybe the important thing is to just find a median position in all things and explore the benefits of different points of view while also allocating enough time to ensure that you are managing your time well.
Yes yes I absolutely and massively agree --- IN the sphere of Very Important Things. However in every day bits and pieces I don't want to have to stop and think to reinvent the wheel for every little system. I kind of want other parts of the distributed specialized machine of Civilisation to have worked out things for me, things like traffic flows and crowd safety at stadiums. I want to be able to drift out half unaware and for the markings on the floor to direct me in a safe and convenient way. It would be good if I didn't have to go out of my way to do that. Seems like a similar concept
Your article has prompted me to explore writing a few essay length posts on Substack. I think the topic of incentives is more nuanced, depending on the scale of analysis, and definition.
From the first living cells to modern civilizations, incentives shape behavior by directing the flow of energy, information, and opportunity.
Biologically, incentives such as nutrients, reproduction, and survival drive adaptation, but can also promote competition, disease, and overconsumption.
Psychologically, curiosity, pleasure, meaning, and social approval motivate learning and creativity, yet they also fuel addiction, anxiety, and status-seeking.
Sociological incentives encourage trust, cooperation, and shared identity, while simultaneously enabling conformity, tribalism, and exclusion.
Economic incentives reward innovation, specialization, and productivity, but can amplify inequality, short-term thinking, and exploitation.
Political incentives coordinate collective action and protect public goods, yet they may also encourage polarization, bureaucratic self-preservation, and the pursuit of power over the common good.
Alex Wissner-Gross argues that intelligent systems tend to maximize future freedom of action—the diversity of options available.
Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle suggests that living systems persist by minimizing uncertainty while remaining adaptive.
Together, these perspectives reveal a fundamental tension: flourishing depends on balancing exploration with stability, expanding possibilities without sacrificing coherence.
Across every scale of life, healthy incentives increase both resilience and the capacity to create richer futures
I'd love to hear your thoughts on different kinds of incentives and the ways to work around them.
One distinction I wonder about is:
- "Hard" incentives: do good at a finance degree and you will very likely make concrete large sums of money which you can exchange for many other things.
- "Soft" incentives: become a good teacher and you will sometimes, unpredictably, and in ways largely non-transmutable to anything else, receive gratitude and enjoyment from having changed people's lives.
And I notice that while hard incentives for concrete money and power are a constant through history, the balance of that against soft incentives, and the particular soft incentives that are seen as most culturally desirable, change over time.
When we say "incentives are wrong" we often mean the former, and then have to decide whether to change the hard or the soft bit to fix things.
- Is politics bad because candidates can make way more money helping the bad guys, and the solution is to raise more money for the good guys? Or is the problem that society needs stronger journalism and a sense of imposed shame so people are more hesitant to publicly get paid to do bad things anymore.
- Would the best society be one in which teachers are paid better than bankers? Or one in which teachers are paid better than today, still less than bankers, but more reliably not yelled at by parents and administrators and held in higher social esteem? (In other words, where the punishment of hard incentives is less, but you still must desire the soft incentive to be willing to do it.)
For me the more useful distinction is less hard vs. soft and more chosen vs. unchosen. If you doing something for money, then what's the money for? Then what's that thing for, and so on, and whatever it's for ultimately, do you actually want that thing, and why? There will still be plenty of disagreements about value when we get to the bottom of things, but I don't think we often get to the bottom of things in the first place.
Also: per your previous post on people getting more boring, is the wealth of our society making incentives harder to not follow? e.g. the difference between being at the 5th percentile and the 50th percentile of wealth is much larger now than it was 100 years ago, does this mean a lot more people are competing for the same set of hard incentives, driving up the personal cost of failing to follow the structural incentives?
And can we distinguish "climbing the ladder" of incentives (blindly following the incentive gradient with no other purpose) versus "avoiding being pushed down the ladder" (trying to maintain a socio-economic status while also maximizing for some other goal)?
Yes, I think the rewards for conventionality have gone way up––this might almost be what development means in the first place, that the structures of society offer you a better deal than breaking all the rules.
I'm not sure if climbing vs. avoiding being pushed down itself makes a big difference. I think the active ingredient in the question you posed is whether you're serving the incentives as a mean to some other end or not.
Was also thinking about this - "positive" incentives (I get X) vs "negative" incentives (maybe more accurately called 'punishments'), and also the incentives of basic necessities (health insurance, housing, education) vs incentives like social or professional prestige, lots of money, etc. I still believe there are people who forsake basic necessities to do the right thing, but it's definitely much harder.
Also -- is pay an incentive for people who don't care about incentives that much (since some people do become school teachers)?
I can't remember who said it (I thought it was Eliezer Yudkowsky but I can't find any reference to it) but I have a vague memory of a quote to the effect of "integrity is acting one way when your incentives point in another"
Sure, but the model of “people act this way because of the incentives” is more useful than “most people are losers who won't do the right thing unless incentivized”
now that is what the fuck i am talking about adam, that’s what’s up. yes! YES!
This doesn't compute for me. You're treating incentives as if they're toys in a Cracker Jacks box. I'm thinking about incentives like "I can pay my mortgage and car payments this month" or "I can avoid a a tax audit that'll probably end up shutting down my company" type incentives since those are the kind that real people have to negotiate in their lives.
I am pretty sure Adam is not arguing that incentives ought never be used or heeded, only that they ought never be allowed to be a “legitimate” excuse for very bad behaviors. As if the incentive were a command that cannot be disobeyed.
Especially those behaviors where the doer is fully aware that circumstances require better than base behavior from decent people. Behaving like a decent person means not choosing to accept an incentive to ruin someone’s day, or their future. Being a decent person is refusing to give in to one’s worst impulses just because “the incentives” are aligned with giving in.
Too often we hear that some company is ruining the local environment because the incentives are aligned with pollution: i.e. no legal punishments outweigh the cost/benefit of polluting. Thus they are not sufficiently incentivized to being a good corporate neighbor.
"Poor me I had to go and buy a house."
"Poor me I had to go and start a business."
Hes absolutely right about it being loser behavior.
Hi Adam, first of all thanks for a helpful post.
I want to talk about two related items in this post: (1) things-that-are-like-talking vs. things-that-are-like-reading; and (2) "we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken". Both of these feel to me very close to Daniel Kahneman's idea of System One vs. System Two thinking. System One is easy and natural and we love to do it, because it's easy, and also we're very good at it; but it relies on gut feelings and gets important things wrong a lot of the time; System Two is hard and difficult and we hate to do it and we're bad at it; we resist doing it until we're forced to.
Talking is easy and natural and System One. The moral/religious model of most people is System One. Relying on incentives to decide how to live your life is System One. All of it is, as you say, "for losers." (OK, talking in and of itself isn't for losers, but if you don't learn how to read....)
Anyway. I think all of this is basically correct and psychologically well-grounded.
If you don't want to be a loser, the next question is how to make yourself *see* that System One is failing you on a specific point. How to get past the easy answers provided by System One and make yourself buckle down and do some hard but necessary System Two thinking -- and, perhaps more importantly, how to know which aspects of your life require this buckling down (and which aspects you can coast for now). This piece mentions something about "seeing the fish" and I appreciate the metaphor and I sort of see what you're getting at (though some more examples would help). But my most important objection is that I don't know how one would operationalize it. "Seeing the fish" seems like something that just happens to you, rather than something you can intentionally do or learn to do better.
Put otherwise: backbone is a virtue, yes, but it's hardly the only virtue that matters. How do we cultivate the better kinds of intellectual habits; how do we get our children to do the same; etc. (Even posing these questions I suddenly feel a little bit like Aristotle.)
Thanks again for writing this. Good stuff.
I'm still thinking about this––I'm not sure it's possible to go looking for fish, only to choose not to look away when you happen to encounter one. "Reconsider your fundamental assumptions" is a tall order, and perhaps an impossible one, without an inciting incident.
I too have met the fish
I see it as like having two lives. The first you didn’t know the fish existed. The second is a choice
I have to disagree with the way you seem to draw lines around the concept of "incentive". Certainly, many (perhaps most) people hear "incentive" and think of money, power, fame, and status. But when you say this:
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?
you are ignoring the fact that people often have, historically, felt incentivized to do the right thing. In a less secular age, people would readily call to mind Matthew 6:20, where Jesus exhorted his followers to "store up treasures in heaven". What is that, if not an incentive toward doing the right thing in the here and now, with the idea of some type of reward in the hereafter?
Not all incentives are material, and not all people respond to the same incentives. But I believe that everyone responds to some kind of incentive. They are an inescapable feature of life. So no, incentives are not just for losers--what can make you a loser is the type of incentive you respond to, and how you respond to it.
This is the first time ever than I'm reading your work sir but your article hit home for me. My mind troubles with a similar problem...(Context: I was studying public policy). We had a conference on public policy and there were dignitaries and academics talking about policy and how things 'ought to be' in this world. We obviously had the best of amenities while we were attending these lectures; an AC room (it's hot in India), best stationery, best teachers where people were talking about poverty and how systems should be. It felt so so ironic that we were talking about people from the lower echelon of the society and we have never even spoken to them, never tried to understand what it is to be them...if you understand how I mean it. My mind was baffled and these questions still haunt me, that day was my 'fish.' These people who want to bring some change or work in public policy haven't encountered the real 'public' and their lives.
There are so many questions on philosophy that take a lot of space in my mind.
Thanku for this article..this is the first time in ever replying or even talking about thoughts like these. I hope you read my message :)
Dear Adam,
Great piece as always!
This is a great analogy: "incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you."
This is a great sentence: "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."
Thank you for sharing all of this, especially the story of Charles Sumner!
Love
Myq
Wisconsin winter, walking out from Mass—one of the step-sleepers asked me “man it’s so cold, you got a blanket?”
Likely patting my coat, as I would had he asked for change—“nah I’m sorry I don’t.”
With the impatience of someone bone-cold and dealing with the umpteenth moron of the day, he said something to the effect of “no shit, Sherlock—would you go buy me one from that very visible and open Walgreens?”
I wandered the aisles in a fish-gazing haze, checked out, mumbled an apology as I handed him the bag and numbly hurried back to the parking garage and home. The memory embarrasses me still.
Having someone or something pierce the amoral fog we are all submerged in in modern times is a blessing in disguise.
I'm not religious, but when I was younger I attended Quaker meetings for a few years. I've always respected the Quakers (that I met) because of the exceptionally strong sense of personal responsibility they all carried. This is an oversimplification, but I think they all preferred to "make better people" instead of trying to "make better systems." Doesn't matter how good your system is if the people running it (being run by it?) suck.
Fantastic article simply for the great debate it created, including being labeled a Communist (without any supporting evidence or explanation, which is so on brand for that kind of statement). And Mr. Eastwood *just* beat me in pointing out the lack of an apostrophe in Finnegans Wake.