I heard this phrase first on a video by Jonathan Blow but it has stuck with me since. The context and example that he gave are irrelevant for we are going to extrapolate it. But before that, let me quote him from memory.
You look at the incentives, and predict the outcomes
Noone is judiciously evil, well, most people are not even though sadism is VERY real thing ( there would be no one in academia otherwise ). For most scenarios though, it’ll all come down to incentives.
What incentive do I have to lie, to not work, to study my own things? What incentive did they have to put me in the predicament I’m in?
Looking at both in isolation, it very much makes sense how things ended up being as they are.
Think about the biggest shift that’s in play today — forcing of LLMs at work. As someone on the receiving end, my hypothesis is that the MBAs looked at, say 10% of the work being done by LLMS, and concluded that to be 1.1x multiplier in productivity.
What incentive does the employee have though? Now that using more and more of LLMs to do work is seen as being “productive”, they ensure that they themselves do not work anymore, nullifying all the productivity gains and blaming the LM in the end. The incentive is to use more LLM, outcome is that more LLM is used and employees DO NOT do work themselves so effectively the productivity remains the same, or in most cases even less as each incremental change would start to require more and more time as bloat begins to pile up.
Another example, if timely completion of projects is only met with more work, what incentive do I have to finish anything on time at all.
Another generic one is any entity ( person or organisation ) involved in maitaining any service x, DOES NOT have an incentive to do any permanent fixes since in doing so they remove the dependency on themselves. I’ve heard the delusional line of thought that “oh, if you did not have to do this, then you would have more time to do that other thing”, which could be an equally worse task or the “that” might never exist and you are replacing yourself. Such a line of thought ONLY makes sense in a very lean organisation, where there is autonomy on individuals and a sense of ownership, and funnily enough somehow every organisation feels that it fits this definition, it’s either some sort of collective hysteria or compulsive lying.
It’s more pronounced in social media. If the incentive is money, no wonder easy to make shortform content is so common; it’s utter garbage and a net negative on society, but that’s what the incentive outcome pair gave us.
Any good discounts immediately get scalped, because that is the incentive it presents.
In fact, this is how writing and creation gets “poisoned”. As soon as the incentive for writing, or creating something is to get noticed, even if it’s an imaginary reader, it shifts the focus, so subtlely that you won’t even realise.
Stars being an incentive on github pushes people to make more and more of the usual retarded projects, mostly LLM related these days.
In order to reach a state of “purity”, there MUST be ( it cannot be 0 ) minimal incentive to make cheap low effort content, people will STILL do it since popularity and fame in any social setting be it digital is still very much craved.
In light of all this, perhaps the PUREST of works are on private git instances and the most honest of writings on personal diaries and unread blogs.