Incentives
June 21, 2026
I find it really useful to think and model through human systems solely by incentives: if this person owns this company and would be best off maneuvering in this manner, then you can expect the company to do so. Or if this person will be better off giving his friend this job, he probably will. Of course this doesn't just solve every problem about modeling these messy and unkown systems: in practice, two big problems are: you still need to know all the information to make an informed guess - this is not easy! and not easy to know when done! and: you need to have an accurate representation of their world model, or at least an idea of what their and similar world models "produce" or choose. Really, a world model is sufficient, but getting B without A seems harder to me.
In practice, though, I typically think this way on the level of single humans only when creating incentives for some reason, rather than analyzing systems. Maybe that's not ideal, but it is the case. I'll think through a game theory lense and try to predict which path will seem the most attractive to the person of interest, and if it's not the path I'd like them to take, tweak the possibilities, be in through making my path a better deal, or making it more visible, so they don't miss it.
Now that I think about it, far and away my most common target with this analysis is myself! Maybe this is true for others, too, but now that I think about it this is the angle I take when planning how to encourage me to do something in the future (eg. when buying only healthy foods at the grocery store to encourage healthy eating for the next week). This makes sense, I know myself and my tendencies quite intimately, and is testimony for the strategy in other areas, if you are able to get similarly familiar with tendencies and considerations of the people of interest.
Anyways, the real reason I wanted to write this was to talk about a broader application of this sort of philosophy. That is: considering situations which encourage weakness, or punish it. An example is in the law: an illiterate unaware of the laws he is expected to abide by will be punished for the same as a law professor, if they commit the same crime. It may seem a little odd that this is so: the later is almost thumbing their nose at the establishment, versus the former who almost didn't know any better! But on further consideration, the later leads to some preverse incentives for a society: one is now encouraged to act convincingly unaware, or worse, really be so! (worth noting there are more pragmatic reasons for this concept, ignorantia juris non excusat, which clarify the alternative as unfeasible, but I like this lense).
I guess, really, what I'm advocating for is the adoption of this mindset beyond the law, in normal life, and most strictly internally, when evaluating your own behavior and planning how to adjust it in the future: don't allow for the exuse of weakness: if you failed to act because inaction was the rational thing to do, but you missed out on something, you should have been walking in to the situation better prepared, such that the rational thing would have been to execute. Just absolute accountability, I guess. Acknowedging that you can do anything, really, and so any other explanation is cope.