>My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. 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?
But this misunderstands incentive based analysis.
The point isn't just that people naturally follow incentives, but that those who refuse are punished and no longer in a position to affect the world.
Taking a principled stand is great and all, but if the result is simply that you get fired and replaced by someone better at following orders, you didn't really fix the problem.
Of course it's more complicated than that. Certainly other people being willing to do evil is no excuse to do evil yourself. Maybe your principled stand inspires others and you start a revolution or something. But that's rare. In the average case incentives win. Which is why if you want to actually change the world for the better you should attack the incentives not the individuals - individuals can be replaced, but millions are willing to follow incentives.
-----
The rest of the article seems to be about developing your own morality, but morality is really just yet another incentive.
Completely agree. Incentives are for the statistical masses.
As thinking individuals we can and should use our awareness and courage to make biggest "good" choices we can bear to. We can't all be zero-waste vegan community organisers lobbying for renewables and free education/healthcare, but I doubt living life with the blinders on leads any kind of moral or spiritual growth or fulfilment either.
Incentives are also for when a principal just doesn't care about the difference between two possible choices. But maybe other people indirectly do, and an incentive like price can weigh the scales so that people indifferent to the choice choose the right one.
I loved this. Unfortunately, I don't know how realistic it is at this point. The entire modern Western system is built on incentives, and it would require dramatically changing the social order and economic system.
Very few people are self starters, I’ve become fixated on increasing the productivity of the population. Anyone excluded or encumbered has things to address why that is, and then add them to the productivity machine. At one point women weren’t included, other marginalized people are excluded, some populations have a tendency to suicide unless we affirm their feelings and then they are productive. All of that fits within my philosophy and makes the tweaks to the workflow easy adopt, if it means more people are included in the productivity engine.
Most of the comments are one level deeper “lets condition all of society to be self starters” with no proposal on how to do so
Who cares what names you call. I would be more powerful and comfortable in this world. While you spend your time calling names that would have zero effect in this world. You would be like a donkey who cries its lust away. Sounds like a total loser to me..
> 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.
> A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose.
This is actually a fairly recent concept.
For a long time, humans across the globe have believed that life had a purpose, but until the 18th and 19th centuries, the belief was more or less that the purpose was dictated by God, the universe, etc. That there was a purpose that applied to everyone, not that everyone had to find his or her own purpose.
> That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong.
The problem with this is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well-meaning people who believe strongly that they are increasing the right and decreasing the wrong are capable of creating many problems. And sometimes, you get really sick people who think they're well-meaning and their "right" is everyone else's "wrong".
> But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.
I'm personally not a fan of the Elons and Zucks of the world, but going around categorizing people into groups like "spiritually chinless, passionless, purpose-lacking sniveling little twerps who only care about getting ahead" probably isn't healthy.
Has the author considered that many of these people simply have beliefs, passions, purposes that don't align with his and that, if asked, they might speak poorly of his beliefs, passions, purposes?
We can debate whether or not these people are, in the final analysis, ethical, but I don't think reducing them to this helps the author's argument.
> Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to?
Most people in this world don't have the luxury of sitting around and figuring out all of the world's mysteries and solving all of the world's problem.
> I saw my fish in 2020 in San Fransisco, during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.5 Inside the conference hotel were dozens of talks about stereotyping, prejudice, inequality, and so on. That had never struck me as strange until that year, when outside of the hotel, which was in the middle of SF’s Tenderloin district, people were sprawled out on the sidewalk, dying of overdoses. Scholars were scurrying past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is ironic because “scholars will scurry past homeless people to give talks on social justice” is literally the main finding from one of the most famous psychology studies of all time.
The author paints his experience as some sort of Siddhartha-like epiphany. The reality is that lots of people have seen what the author saw, and worse. Any many were affected by it. But just because they didn't stop and play Jesus (which the author apparently didn't do either) doesn't mean that they didn't notice and weren't affected.
The author seems to be assuming that he's one of the few people who isn't oblivious.
> When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered. They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance t...
I really like the article but I feel like ignoring incentives always costs something. Only people who can afford the cost get to look principled, which turns having money into looking like having character. Everyone he praises in the article has/had a safety net: Sumner was a Harvard-educated senator with inherited standing, the writer himself still had a career after dropping his uni title.
The fish metaphor has the same issue. The people dying on the sidewalk outside his conference have seen worse than he has, they don't lack moral clarity but rather the freedom and capital to rebuild their lives around it. His essay treats seeing the fish and acting on it as a single moment when the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net.
It is true that privileged people can sacrifice more to do the right thing simply because they have much more than they need to survive. But most people of all levels of privilege can do better, and it's not a competition where you are only a success if you do the most good. Good is good even in small quantities regardless of if you ever have a statue made after you.
> the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net
Not really. If you go back in history, many figures did not have the capital / social safety net to follow their principles. Diogenes comes to mind. Buddha shunned his princely life. Epicurus. The OP did not say it would be easy.
This seems to misrepresent what incentives are: latent unobservable things. Incentives are not what you or anyone else says they are. It makes sense to simply state the incentives in academic games which are of course useful at times.
So the author is making some point about wrong incentive models and meta models.
This article reflects my values and philosophy exactly... However I think the author is underestimating the cost of not following incentives. It's torture.
In this society, I'm a loser precisely because I ignored incentives. I think we live in a failed society so I don't mind that much being a loser in such society. I don't think I would feel any pride being a winner... However, I would very much appreciate the financial comfort of not having to participate in it! So that would be the advantage of being a winner.
It's the great irony; the winners who have the option to not participate, want to participate... And the losers who ignore incentives find that they are forced to participate sooner or later!
Right now I think my current job is probably unethical. Though most people would probably not think so. They just didn't look for the devil in the details.
Most people are lucky to have been following incentives subconsciously, believing that incentives align with economic efficiency and, therefore, moral virtue. I was not so lucky to believe that. Now I have to do stuff that I know to be unethical to free myself. Is this the definition of corruption? Isn't it a worse form of corruption if you don't even bother trying to understand the impact of what you're doing? Or worse, you deceive yourself?
I know it's kinda beside the point but I like incentives compared to hard rules as a policy measure. They are much more effective, less bureaucratic and easier to push through. They are like weights vs. booleans.
Don't like smoking? Try out right banning it. It's impossible. You have to fight the lobbyist, the addicted consumers, the workers employed by the industry, ... Slapping a tax on it is much easier. A soft NO that's giving everyone time to adjust.
The game theorists/economists have studied this stuff in depth under the rubric of "mechanism design" or "market design". The relevant concept is "incentive compatibility" where the agents in the system do the right thing (whatever that was intended to be/designed for) because any deviation from that costs them more than playing nice.
The Wikipedia article [0] is not yet great but does give the two classic examples of "second-price auctions and a simple majority vote between two choices". The Gibbard–Satterthwaite shows the difficulty in extending this to more choices (in that Arrow's theorem sort of way).
The best thing I've read on this stuff is Alvin Roth's "Who Gets What and Why" (2015) [1] which is worth a read in any case. Repugnant markets!
I remember this book: Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn
"The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train a family pet. The quick fix of rewards may seem to be effective, but manipulating people with external incentives actually kills their interest in what they are doing and lowers the quality of their work."
I think as a culture, we teach the wrong things to kids.
1) Bribe/corruption is okay: Do this (eat broccoli, finish homework, etc) and I'll give you an incentive/bribe (candy, play time, screen time).
2) Magic: Kids are scientific and curious, they ask millions of questions. Explain everything away by magic (fairytales), religion, god, govt, economics, etc. Nobody has the knowledge or patience to deal with the continuous stream of questions.
We train kids to accept these things as defaults of culture.
> Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing.
And, people are also being rewarded for doing the right thing. Don't conflate the two.
Just because some incentives are rewarding the wrong behavior doesn't invalidate the concept. We're surrounded by incentives at work in every part of our life.
Fiat money only works because we are incentivized to believe in it.
Democracy works because we're mostly incentivized to support it.
Governments, countries, companies, parks, global trade, science, and shipping only work because of the complex web of positive and negative incentives we've built up to support them. They're not perfect, and never will be. And they also shouldn't be perfect (despite our natural inclination to want the "perfect"). The worst atrocities humankind has seen were driven by the pursuit of perfection and purity.
The cobra effect is what happens when you choose your incentives poorly. That's not a fault of the concept.
Even if you think you cannot escape incentives - there exists a thing for shaping them - it is called "regulation". Some still consider it a dirty word though.
As someone who has helped drug addicts in an organisation called "Proyecto Hombre" in Spain you probably don't understand how hard is to help someone in this situation and that sometimes you CAN'T.
It is very typical that when someone gets on drugs even the father of the person stops trying to help after several failed trials. Only the mothers stay. And it is so painful to watch. The kind of abuses mothers tolerate from their children.
Substances destroys the typical regulating behaviour of the brain. They literally can't see the harm they do to others. You usually can't help them until they hit rock bottom and open a window for you to intervene.
For helping you need knowledge and training and "trying to help" without it could do more harm than good.
About the moral obligation to help the drug addicts, as "social justice", I would call this "injustice". Here is the typical situation: Someone takes drugs in a social group because is "cool". In the same group there is someone that decides not to take them. He is humiliated by the group and it takes a lot of work. One of the members of the group gets addicted, do terrible things and asks for help.
It is usual that the one that did not take drugs, or the brother in the family ask the question "why are you helping this person that decided to go this way herself?"
"Why are you expending like 10x more resources in this person that did everything wrong than in me when did everything well (studied instead of earning easy money selling drugs, that had to withstand the pressure and humiliations by the group).
Drugs are super expensive and addicts will do anything to get their dose, supporting the addicts usually takes all the resources from a family, neglecting the resources to other members of the family. If the State provides the support, the same thing happens. Should the State spend exorbitant resources that the rest of the society has to pay taking the resources from everyone that needs them?
If I kill someone, or behave like an asshole, everyone will hate me, so I've got an incentive not to. Is that so horrible?
The reason that people talk about incentives when it comes to politics is that laws and large parts of present day's richer countries economic systems are controlled by laws, contracts, associations between countries, companies, people, etc. and are an artificially created ruleset. That means if you change rules you change incentives. Eg. if you know a government will bail you out, you lose the incentive to avoid risky things, if there is a tax on something you are it will influence your monetary incentives, if being an asshole is looked upon favorably then you have an incentive to be one. Also if tax fraud isn't considered a crime by large parts of people or is seen as smart then you have an incentive to commit it.
A lot of social change good and bad came from shifts in good and bad incentives.
Even more. If you look at the legal and prison systems in Norway vs eg the US the incentives that individuals, governments and corporations have are a reason for a 5 year recidivism rate of 70% vs 20%.
In general if you think your life will be better as a criminal than the alternative then you will be incentivized become one. If you can choose between joining the mafia that might even care for you or barely getting through with day jobs then you are incentivized to do so.
So if a government manages to make sure your life will certainly better, than the incentive to join is a whole lot lower.
If you are shamed vs praised (or otherwise feel supported) for sexism or racism you will have an incentive to go a certain way.
Cults and so on used incentives in a bad way, many parents use incentives in a good way ("if you clean up your room/finish your homework/behave you'll get ice cream later").
The reason people talk about incentives is because they shape whether things are likely to work out. As we've seen big public companies usually will do everything they can get away with and will break laws if the expected profit is higher than the potential fine. That is a wrong and very much changeable incentive.
And it doesn't have to be laws. It can be public opinion. If the marketing is more expensive than just not doing a bad thing in first place then that's an incentive as well.
Incentives are the things that make people do things good and bad. Incentives are the reason people go out of bed and be it just the incentive to ease the pressure on their full bladder. And even there if getting up will cost you great pain you might have a higher incentive there.
Just like people going to doctors is often dominated by incentives of getting rid of a sickness vs not having to pay money or endure a potentially painful or side effect rich treatment.
Incentives are about tricking the selfish side of people into doing things that are valuable for others, which can be an incredibly powerful force, but it’s not the only way to get people to do things, and it’s not okay to be absolutely selfish and outsource your responsibility to the system.
The premise of this article only works because the author has taken an overly narrow definition of an 'incentive' - as if an incentive can only be offered by a social media app for a quick dopamine hit.
What's they are missing is that it's all incentives, all the way down. You want to be a good kind person? You feel good when you believe you've demonstrated this - but you're just acting on incentives you've set for yourself to feel good. You want to feel morally superior by quitting social media (thereby avoiding the overt incentives to the contrary) or donating more to charity? Same thing - you're following incentives you've created for yourself to be the person you want to be and be seen as.
--
Also, FWIW, I strongly disliked the mid-article moralisation - implying that people are somehow flawed, inferior individuals if they haven't examined every aspect of their world and developed a deep understanding of it that could never be challenged. This is just a self-serving conceit of someone who feels superior because they think they see the matrix (or fish). The world is full of people who live their lives as best they can, trying to be decent people as best they can, without having the time, energy, or incentive to dive deeper into things as the author seems to believe they should. Are they inferior people? No. So f#ck this author and their snide superior moralistic b#llshit.
53 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadBut this misunderstands incentive based analysis.
The point isn't just that people naturally follow incentives, but that those who refuse are punished and no longer in a position to affect the world.
Taking a principled stand is great and all, but if the result is simply that you get fired and replaced by someone better at following orders, you didn't really fix the problem.
Of course it's more complicated than that. Certainly other people being willing to do evil is no excuse to do evil yourself. Maybe your principled stand inspires others and you start a revolution or something. But that's rare. In the average case incentives win. Which is why if you want to actually change the world for the better you should attack the incentives not the individuals - individuals can be replaced, but millions are willing to follow incentives.
-----
The rest of the article seems to be about developing your own morality, but morality is really just yet another incentive.
As thinking individuals we can and should use our awareness and courage to make biggest "good" choices we can bear to. We can't all be zero-waste vegan community organisers lobbying for renewables and free education/healthcare, but I doubt living life with the blinders on leads any kind of moral or spiritual growth or fulfilment either.
Very few people are self starters, I’ve become fixated on increasing the productivity of the population. Anyone excluded or encumbered has things to address why that is, and then add them to the productivity machine. At one point women weren’t included, other marginalized people are excluded, some populations have a tendency to suicide unless we affirm their feelings and then they are productive. All of that fits within my philosophy and makes the tweaks to the workflow easy adopt, if it means more people are included in the productivity engine.
Most of the comments are one level deeper “lets condition all of society to be self starters” with no proposal on how to do so
Incentives it is
> then you’re a dummy and a schmuck
Who cares what names you call. I would be more powerful and comfortable in this world. While you spend your time calling names that would have zero effect in this world. You would be like a donkey who cries its lust away. Sounds like a total loser to me..
What lovely writing.
This is actually a fairly recent concept.
For a long time, humans across the globe have believed that life had a purpose, but until the 18th and 19th centuries, the belief was more or less that the purpose was dictated by God, the universe, etc. That there was a purpose that applied to everyone, not that everyone had to find his or her own purpose.
> That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong.
The problem with this is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well-meaning people who believe strongly that they are increasing the right and decreasing the wrong are capable of creating many problems. And sometimes, you get really sick people who think they're well-meaning and their "right" is everyone else's "wrong".
> But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.
I'm personally not a fan of the Elons and Zucks of the world, but going around categorizing people into groups like "spiritually chinless, passionless, purpose-lacking sniveling little twerps who only care about getting ahead" probably isn't healthy.
Has the author considered that many of these people simply have beliefs, passions, purposes that don't align with his and that, if asked, they might speak poorly of his beliefs, passions, purposes?
We can debate whether or not these people are, in the final analysis, ethical, but I don't think reducing them to this helps the author's argument.
> Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to?
Most people in this world don't have the luxury of sitting around and figuring out all of the world's mysteries and solving all of the world's problem.
> I saw my fish in 2020 in San Fransisco, during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.5 Inside the conference hotel were dozens of talks about stereotyping, prejudice, inequality, and so on. That had never struck me as strange until that year, when outside of the hotel, which was in the middle of SF’s Tenderloin district, people were sprawled out on the sidewalk, dying of overdoses. Scholars were scurrying past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is ironic because “scholars will scurry past homeless people to give talks on social justice” is literally the main finding from one of the most famous psychology studies of all time.
The author paints his experience as some sort of Siddhartha-like epiphany. The reality is that lots of people have seen what the author saw, and worse. Any many were affected by it. But just because they didn't stop and play Jesus (which the author apparently didn't do either) doesn't mean that they didn't notice and weren't affected.
The author seems to be assuming that he's one of the few people who isn't oblivious.
> When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered. They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance t...
The fish metaphor has the same issue. The people dying on the sidewalk outside his conference have seen worse than he has, they don't lack moral clarity but rather the freedom and capital to rebuild their lives around it. His essay treats seeing the fish and acting on it as a single moment when the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net.
Not really. If you go back in history, many figures did not have the capital / social safety net to follow their principles. Diogenes comes to mind. Buddha shunned his princely life. Epicurus. The OP did not say it would be easy.
So the author is making some point about wrong incentive models and meta models.
In this society, I'm a loser precisely because I ignored incentives. I think we live in a failed society so I don't mind that much being a loser in such society. I don't think I would feel any pride being a winner... However, I would very much appreciate the financial comfort of not having to participate in it! So that would be the advantage of being a winner.
It's the great irony; the winners who have the option to not participate, want to participate... And the losers who ignore incentives find that they are forced to participate sooner or later!
Right now I think my current job is probably unethical. Though most people would probably not think so. They just didn't look for the devil in the details.
Most people are lucky to have been following incentives subconsciously, believing that incentives align with economic efficiency and, therefore, moral virtue. I was not so lucky to believe that. Now I have to do stuff that I know to be unethical to free myself. Is this the definition of corruption? Isn't it a worse form of corruption if you don't even bother trying to understand the impact of what you're doing? Or worse, you deceive yourself?
Don't like smoking? Try out right banning it. It's impossible. You have to fight the lobbyist, the addicted consumers, the workers employed by the industry, ... Slapping a tax on it is much easier. A soft NO that's giving everyone time to adjust.
The Wikipedia article [0] is not yet great but does give the two classic examples of "second-price auctions and a simple majority vote between two choices". The Gibbard–Satterthwaite shows the difficulty in extending this to more choices (in that Arrow's theorem sort of way).
The best thing I've read on this stuff is Alvin Roth's "Who Gets What and Why" (2015) [1] which is worth a read in any case. Repugnant markets!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_E._Roth#Market_design
"The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train a family pet. The quick fix of rewards may seem to be effective, but manipulating people with external incentives actually kills their interest in what they are doing and lowers the quality of their work."
1) Bribe/corruption is okay: Do this (eat broccoli, finish homework, etc) and I'll give you an incentive/bribe (candy, play time, screen time).
2) Magic: Kids are scientific and curious, they ask millions of questions. Explain everything away by magic (fairytales), religion, god, govt, economics, etc. Nobody has the knowledge or patience to deal with the continuous stream of questions.
We train kids to accept these things as defaults of culture.
The only parent that comes to mind who seems to have understood this is Richard Feynman's dad who taught him to think like a scientist, question authority, etc: https://www.wondersofphysics.com/2021/06/what-did-feynman-le...
No, we don't.
> Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing.
And, people are also being rewarded for doing the right thing. Don't conflate the two.
Just because some incentives are rewarding the wrong behavior doesn't invalidate the concept. We're surrounded by incentives at work in every part of our life.
Fiat money only works because we are incentivized to believe in it.
Democracy works because we're mostly incentivized to support it.
Governments, countries, companies, parks, global trade, science, and shipping only work because of the complex web of positive and negative incentives we've built up to support them. They're not perfect, and never will be. And they also shouldn't be perfect (despite our natural inclination to want the "perfect"). The worst atrocities humankind has seen were driven by the pursuit of perfection and purity.
The cobra effect is what happens when you choose your incentives poorly. That's not a fault of the concept.
It is very typical that when someone gets on drugs even the father of the person stops trying to help after several failed trials. Only the mothers stay. And it is so painful to watch. The kind of abuses mothers tolerate from their children.
Substances destroys the typical regulating behaviour of the brain. They literally can't see the harm they do to others. You usually can't help them until they hit rock bottom and open a window for you to intervene.
For helping you need knowledge and training and "trying to help" without it could do more harm than good.
About the moral obligation to help the drug addicts, as "social justice", I would call this "injustice". Here is the typical situation: Someone takes drugs in a social group because is "cool". In the same group there is someone that decides not to take them. He is humiliated by the group and it takes a lot of work. One of the members of the group gets addicted, do terrible things and asks for help.
It is usual that the one that did not take drugs, or the brother in the family ask the question "why are you helping this person that decided to go this way herself?" "Why are you expending like 10x more resources in this person that did everything wrong than in me when did everything well (studied instead of earning easy money selling drugs, that had to withstand the pressure and humiliations by the group).
Drugs are super expensive and addicts will do anything to get their dose, supporting the addicts usually takes all the resources from a family, neglecting the resources to other members of the family. If the State provides the support, the same thing happens. Should the State spend exorbitant resources that the rest of the society has to pay taking the resources from everyone that needs them?
"We can all agree: the incentives are bad."
Seriously?!
If I kill someone, or behave like an asshole, everyone will hate me, so I've got an incentive not to. Is that so horrible?
The reason that people talk about incentives when it comes to politics is that laws and large parts of present day's richer countries economic systems are controlled by laws, contracts, associations between countries, companies, people, etc. and are an artificially created ruleset. That means if you change rules you change incentives. Eg. if you know a government will bail you out, you lose the incentive to avoid risky things, if there is a tax on something you are it will influence your monetary incentives, if being an asshole is looked upon favorably then you have an incentive to be one. Also if tax fraud isn't considered a crime by large parts of people or is seen as smart then you have an incentive to commit it.
A lot of social change good and bad came from shifts in good and bad incentives.
Even more. If you look at the legal and prison systems in Norway vs eg the US the incentives that individuals, governments and corporations have are a reason for a 5 year recidivism rate of 70% vs 20%.
In general if you think your life will be better as a criminal than the alternative then you will be incentivized become one. If you can choose between joining the mafia that might even care for you or barely getting through with day jobs then you are incentivized to do so.
So if a government manages to make sure your life will certainly better, than the incentive to join is a whole lot lower.
If you are shamed vs praised (or otherwise feel supported) for sexism or racism you will have an incentive to go a certain way.
Cults and so on used incentives in a bad way, many parents use incentives in a good way ("if you clean up your room/finish your homework/behave you'll get ice cream later").
The reason people talk about incentives is because they shape whether things are likely to work out. As we've seen big public companies usually will do everything they can get away with and will break laws if the expected profit is higher than the potential fine. That is a wrong and very much changeable incentive.
And it doesn't have to be laws. It can be public opinion. If the marketing is more expensive than just not doing a bad thing in first place then that's an incentive as well.
Incentives are the things that make people do things good and bad. Incentives are the reason people go out of bed and be it just the incentive to ease the pressure on their full bladder. And even there if getting up will cost you great pain you might have a higher incentive there.
Just like people going to doctors is often dominated by incentives of getting rid of a sickness vs not having to pay money or endure a potentially painful or side effect rich treatment.
What's they are missing is that it's all incentives, all the way down. You want to be a good kind person? You feel good when you believe you've demonstrated this - but you're just acting on incentives you've set for yourself to feel good. You want to feel morally superior by quitting social media (thereby avoiding the overt incentives to the contrary) or donating more to charity? Same thing - you're following incentives you've created for yourself to be the person you want to be and be seen as.
--
Also, FWIW, I strongly disliked the mid-article moralisation - implying that people are somehow flawed, inferior individuals if they haven't examined every aspect of their world and developed a deep understanding of it that could never be challenged. This is just a self-serving conceit of someone who feels superior because they think they see the matrix (or fish). The world is full of people who live their lives as best they can, trying to be decent people as best they can, without having the time, energy, or incentive to dive deeper into things as the author seems to believe they should. Are they inferior people? No. So f#ck this author and their snide superior moralistic b#llshit.