Does this come close to being a ‘group selection’ argument?
I am not talking about natural or unnatural selection. I’m talking about incentives.
The police, as an organization, cannot ‘want’ anything, since police departments are not agents capable of wanting.
I don’t think this is a useful tack to take. By the same reasoning, organizations cannot ‘do’ anything as well. Reductionism is not a universal tool to be applied to everything you see.
are likely to justify and coordinate
They don’t need to justify and coordinate—they need just to do it.
I could just as easily see police enlistment as selecting for people who specifically desire to help people be less afraid.
You know you can test your seeing against empirical reality, right? :-)
Part of Alan Greenspan’s apology was that his biggest mistake was to believe that’s true.
Organisations are structured in a way to incentivise behavior that benefits them but nobody gets a promotion as a police officer because his superiors think he advanced the interest of the police by getting the population to be more afraid.
Part of Alan Greenspan’s apology was that his biggest mistake was to believe that’s true.
You are mistaken. It is true that organization’s incentives are always transmitted to the individuals within it. What is not true is that those are the only incentives which these individuals have.
I am not talking about natural or unnatural selection. I’m talking about incentives.
I don’t think this is a useful tack to take. By the same reasoning, organizations cannot ‘do’ anything as well. Reductionism is not a universal tool to be applied to everything you see.
They don’t need to justify and coordinate—they need just to do it.
You know you can test your seeing against empirical reality, right? :-)
Incentives work on individuals. If the individuals inside an organisation have no incentive but the group as a whole doesn’t, nothing gets done.
Funny how all the organizations are arranged in such a way that the organization’s incentives are transmitted to the individuals inside them...
Part of Alan Greenspan’s apology was that his biggest mistake was to believe that’s true. Organisations are structured in a way to incentivise behavior that benefits them but nobody gets a promotion as a police officer because his superiors think he advanced the interest of the police by getting the population to be more afraid.
You are mistaken. It is true that organization’s incentives are always transmitted to the individuals within it. What is not true is that those are the only incentives which these individuals have.
I wish it didn’t.