Incentives are for losers

photo cred: my dadWe can all agree: the incentives are bad. Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. This has become the go-to diagnosis for every problem, from climate change to political polarization to scientific malfeasance—“sorry pal, you’ve got a bad case of the incentives.”I don’t disagree with this analysis, exactly. Who could? It’s basically tautological. “People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?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?There’s a point here that should go without saying, but instead it has simply gone unsaid. Which is: incentives are for losers. Doing something simply because an arbitrary reward system will give you a lil treat—that’s for pigeons, not people. If you build your life around satisfying incentives, then you’re a dummy and a schmuck.1When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.2A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice. These kids ran the bases like little princes. Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented. The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball.I say all this because 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.A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose. That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong. Once your neural tube has ballooned into a brain, once you can poop without issue, conjugate irregular verbs, and feed yourself solid foods, you ought to ask yourself, “Why am I doing these things?” What’s it all for? How can I make myself useful?It’s fine if you’re still working on your answers to those questions. It’s fine—and good!—if you have multiple answers, or if your answers change over time. But it’s not fine to pass on the questions entirely. We owe these answer to each other, and we owe them to ourselves, because a sense of purpose is both prosocial and protective. If you have a void where your moral convictions should be, then that cavity of your personality will get filled up with tumorous desires—for money, power, fame, status. This is the kind of person who “responds to incentives”.It took me a long time to understand this. In my early 20s, when I was at the bottom of every ladder that I aspired to ascend, I assumed the people at the top of those ladders must be pretty great. How wise these incentive-maxxers must be, how cool and smart, to have the things that everybody else wants!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.Often, these are the people who are most insistent that the incentives ought to be obeyed. They are quick to swear that good grades, cash, prestige, etc. are inherently valuable, or that they are useful proxies for value. The incentive-obsessives feel this way because they have to. Like the government of a failing nation, they must swear that their currency is real, and they must lash out at anyone attempting to participate in an alternative economy, lest the whole fraud come crashing down upon itself.Without any formal instruction, approximately 100% of humans will learn to speak, and approximately 0% of humans will learn to read. Talking comes easy and early, enabled by ancient mental structures that hoover up words and extract the meaning behind them. These are the original LLMs, and still the best in the known universe. Reading, on the other hand, comes late and laboriously, piggybacking on bits of brain that were never meant to decode squiggles on paper, let alone comprehend Finnegans Wake.So when thinking about any human ability, it’s useful to ask: is this more like speaking, or is it more like reading? Is this an ancient capability that we get for free just by living long enough, or is this a modern skill that you can’t get without working for it?Developing a value system seems to be a lot more like reading, because research suggests that many people don’t make it very far.In the early 2000s, the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton asked hundreds of American teenagers about their religious beliefs. What they got in return was a bunch of gobbledygook. Regardless of their supposed faith, few of these teens could say anything specific about the divine. Most of them believed that God is like, this cool dude who floats in the sky and wants everybody to be happy and to get along, and if you ask him nicely he might help you achieve your goals, but otherwise he’s mostly busy floating. Fortunately, this celestial butler is not super specific about what you should and shouldn’t do, and he doesn’t really speak unless spoken to.3Smith and Denton came up with a name for this thin soup of theology: moralistic therapeutic deism. They only studied teenagers, but they suspect that many people remain moralistic therapeutic deists for their whole lives—after all, the teens probably picked up this loose handful of beliefs from their parents. People will claim on surveys that they belong to a certain religion, or they’ll get riled up about specific bits of dogma. But if you dig into their beliefs at all, you’ll soon hit a gooey core of underbaked religious mishmash.4I first encountered this research a decade ago, but when I revisited it recently, I realized something remarkable: this appears to be a rare case where sociologists and psychologists have discovered the same phenomenon by approaching it from different directions. It’s like we started excavating on opposite sides of the Earth, and now we’ve finally clanged shovels.On the psychology side, we called this discovery the illusion of explanatory depth. As I’ve written before, people seem to understand the world exactly as well as they need to, and no better. Everyone knows how to use a toilet, for example, but they mistakenly think they also know how a toilet works.I think this illusion is inevitable, given the architecture of the mind. According to predictive processing theory, the mind is always trying to guess what’s going to happen next, and it only updates its guesses when its expectations don’t match its experience. If you run that algorithm for a while, you’ll end up with a model of the world that is good enough, even if it’s not particularly good. You don’t notice the errors in your model until you run smack-dab into them, and every time you correct one, you assume that you’ve gotten them all.From the sociology side, this same phenomenon can show up as something like moralistic therapeutic deism. People’s folk morality and folk religion, just like their folk physics, their folk biology, etc., are exactly as detailed as they need to be. Don’t hit, don’t steal, take turns, say please and thank you—almost everyone achieves this basic level of moral development, because otherwise you’ll end up friendless, if not incarcerated. Similarly, almost everyone acquires some vague notion of an all-seeing, sky-dwelling God through simple osmosis. (After all, He is kind of everywhere, literally and metaphorically.)But beyond a handful of high-level principles, most folks remain mushy on the particulars. Smith and Denton didn’t perform the whole illusion of explanatory depth protocol with their participants, but I’m willing to bet that everyone feels like they have a coherent system of ethical and religious beliefs right up until you ask them any specific questions.Our value systems are flimsy for the same reason our scientific reasoning is flimsy: we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken. So unless your pastor is popping quizzes during the sermon and cold-calling people in the pews, and unless you find yourself thrust into various Trolley Problems on a regular basis, there’s nothing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and theological convictions. Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get yourself into trouble, or even worse, into a philosophy PhD program.pictured: a man getting research experience so he’s more competitive on his graduate school applicationsThis could explain why our sense of right and wrong is so easily overwritten by any half-decent system of rewards and punishments: we just don’t