The nice thing about working with incentives is that they’re pretty stable relative to political leanings. I’d expect a given person’s perceptions of politicians’ level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation, but you can actually leverage that to get changes in incentive structures passed: just frame it as necessary to curb the excesses of those guys over there, you know, the ones you hate.
And in any case the quote works just as well for the governed. As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority. Of course, it’s also harder to do.
As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority. Of course, it’s also harder to do.
That sounds very intriguing. Can you give some example of how you’ve used “playing with incentives” successfully to (I assume—correct me if I’m wrong) maintain a productive forum? That might be very enlightening—seriously, no irony here.
Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there’s lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.
Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there’s too much complaining going on (I didn’t, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like “Constructive Criticism”.
Sorry, I’ve never run a forum. Is there any easy place to learn enough to make “user titles are no longer based on postcount” make sense to me (unless you want to take the time to explain it). I really am very interested.
Sure. One feature in phpBB and several other popular bulletin board packages (but not in reddit or Slashdot or any of their descendants) is the ability to set user titles: little snippets of descriptive text that get displayed after a user’s handle and which are usually intended to give some information about their status in the forum.
The most common arrangement is to have a couple of special titles for administrative positions (say, “mod” and “admin”), then several others for normal users that’re tiered based on the number of posts the user’s written, i.e. postcount: a user might start with the title “newbie” or “lurker”, then progress through five or six cutely themed titles as they post more stuff. It’s common for admins to change the exact titles and the progression pattern to suit the needs of the forum (a roleplaying forum for example might name them after monsters of increasing power), but uncommon to change the basic scheme.
You may notice that this doesn’t differentiate on post quality.
I’d expect a given person’s perceptions of politicians’ level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation
Very few people argued that Cato was corrupt. Even those who disagreed with him mostly didn’t.
As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority.
I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people. You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.
I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people.
I’d say that setting up incentives so that people within a system do culturally useful things out of their own self-interest is about as close to an opposite of corrupting people as we’re likely to find.
Doing X for specially crafted incentive Y for the intrinsic value of X is a form of corruption. It’s not always possible that all decisions are made for the intrinsic value but if you have a political enviroment where there a lot pressure to do Y’s.
Especially if you can’t get any political power without Y, you won’t have many people who persue political goals for their intrinsic value in your political system.
Things work much better when the politicians do what they consider to be right instead of having to do be coercied into taking any position that’s political advantageous.
That’s a… remarkably loose definition of corruption you’ve got going on there.
I’m not sure it’s practical to make a political system completely free of incentives, as long as you’re working with humans governing humans: the closest approximations I can think of would have to involve a leadership caste socially and economically isolated from the people they govern and without any means of improving their own welfare, and that’s so far removed from anything historical I know about that I don’t even want to try working out all its long-term implications. Imperial Japan’s about the closest, and that degenerated at first into proxy governance by provincial warlords and later into a military-aristocratic dictatorship ruling in the imperial family’s name but not in practice controlled by it.
Now, given anything resembling our existing politics, it seems naive to behave as if the default incentives surrounding political power are nonexistent or weak enough that they’re drowned out by altruistic impulses among those inclined to seek power—or even among random members of the populace, if you prefer direct democracy. This being the case, it makes far more sense to me to design systems to reward competent government—however defined—rather than to high-handedly dismiss any such attempts as unethical and rely wholly on the better angels of politicians’ natures.
I’m not quite prepared to say that there can’t exist any candidate systems where this wouldn’t be necessary, but if you’ve got a proposal like that, we should really be talking about that proposal rather than speaking in generalities.
I’m not sure it’s practical to make a political system completely free of incentives.
I’m not sure such a thing has been proposed (after reading most, if not all of this thread); in fact it sounds so absurd that I can’t imagine what such a proposal would look like.
Maybe ChristianKI will correct me if he/she really is proposing a “political system completely free of incentives”.
In The Tamuli, by David Eddings, one country’s political system is described as an attempt to limit corruption. (The usual caveats regarding fictional evidence apply here, of course). In short, when a person is elected onto the ruling council of the Isle of Tega, all that he owns is sold, and the money is deposited into the country’s treasury. He is then simply not permitted to own anything until his term is up, some four years later (presumably food and housing is provided at the expense of the state); when that time comes, the money in the treasury is divided among the ministers in proportion to how much they put in (and the former ministers presumably start re-purchasing stuff). Note that the one thing that the ministers are not allowed to do is to change the tax rates.
This is described as having two consequences. First of all, the Isle of Tega is the only country that always shows a profit. Secondly, the minute that a man is nominated to become a minister, he is put under immediate armed guard to prevent him from running away (and remains under armed guard until his term is over). A government position is viewed with the same trepidation as a prison sentance.
Wouldn’t they still have incentives to aid parties who promise to repay them once their term is up? Similar to how some legislators conveniently acquire lucrative positions requiring little-to-no effort on their part from companies who they have helped out through the years once they’ve retired from politics?
Or to aid their families and friends, or to adopt policies that benefit their industry or hometown or social class—I considered similar systems when I was writing the ancestor (probably unconsciously influenced by Eddings; I haven’t read him in years, though), but decided that they were transparently unworkable.
Yes, it seems both too drastic, and not really able to accomplish the desired result.
Funny, I’ve wondered about a similarly drastic action though to improve the quality of voting, namely for each election select a random 1% (or some such—small enough to not crash the economy) of the population and lock them up with nothing to do but learn about what’s going on in the country and in the world and debate who they should vote for. In the end, unlike in the jury system, it should still be a secret ballot. Of course, if as many people were exempted as in jury duty, then it would be biased. One would have to see how much exemption was unavoidable, and and see whether the bias could be sufficiently minimized.
random 1% (or some such—small enough to not crash the economy)
If it’s small enough not to crash the economy, then is it big enough to reliably alter the election results? And who provides the information for them to read through?
Wouldn’t they still have incentives to aid parties who promise to repay them once their term is up?
Only if they can trust the promise; once their term is up, the parties have little real incentive to stick to their promise, after all.
There will be an incentive to aid people who immediately donate a great big chunk of money to the State, as that money will be shared out among the ministers at the end of their term in any case; but the incentive only works, there, if the great big chunk of money is more than the state would obtain by other means.
Doing X for specially crafted incentive Y for the intrinsic value of X is a form of corruption. It’s not always possible that all decisions are made for the intrinsic value but if you have a political enviroment where there a lot pressure to do Y’s.
Especially if you can’t get any political power without Y, you won’t have many people who persue political goals for their intrinsic value in your political system.
This seems like possibly quite a useful bit of abstraction and offer the potential of arguing the merits of a single principle that appears in many manifestations, in politics, corporations, volunteer organizations, etc. But I’m just having trouble getting it clearly in my head. Two things might help.
1) One or 2 concrete examples where you flesh out “X” and “Y”. I spent 2 years in a math Ph.D. program, which is long enough to know that to move forward with an abstraction, it is best to start with at least a couple of examples.
2) Consider the “agency problem” (or “principle-agent problem”), which to me seems the most promising abstraction for reasoning about corruption. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_problem, and maybe very close to what you’re aiming at.
You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.
Be sure to let us know when you find such people. One of the main conceits of this site is that rationalists should win. If it’s possible to get ahead by not being a rationalist (even temporarily), people are going to do that. Ultimately, I think what the original quote from Friedman boils down to is the old adage that you should try to fix the system rather than blame the people in it.
The nice thing about working with incentives is that they’re pretty stable relative to political leanings. I’d expect a given person’s perceptions of politicians’ level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation, but you can actually leverage that to get changes in incentive structures passed: just frame it as necessary to curb the excesses of those guys over there, you know, the ones you hate.
And in any case the quote works just as well for the governed. As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority. Of course, it’s also harder to do.
That sounds very intriguing. Can you give some example of how you’ve used “playing with incentives” successfully to (I assume—correct me if I’m wrong) maintain a productive forum? That might be very enlightening—seriously, no irony here.
Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there’s lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.
Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there’s too much complaining going on (I didn’t, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like “Constructive Criticism”.
Sorry, I’ve never run a forum. Is there any easy place to learn enough to make “user titles are no longer based on postcount” make sense to me (unless you want to take the time to explain it). I really am very interested.
Sure. One feature in phpBB and several other popular bulletin board packages (but not in reddit or Slashdot or any of their descendants) is the ability to set user titles: little snippets of descriptive text that get displayed after a user’s handle and which are usually intended to give some information about their status in the forum.
The most common arrangement is to have a couple of special titles for administrative positions (say, “mod” and “admin”), then several others for normal users that’re tiered based on the number of posts the user’s written, i.e. postcount: a user might start with the title “newbie” or “lurker”, then progress through five or six cutely themed titles as they post more stuff. It’s common for admins to change the exact titles and the progression pattern to suit the needs of the forum (a roleplaying forum for example might name them after monsters of increasing power), but uncommon to change the basic scheme.
You may notice that this doesn’t differentiate on post quality.
Look up some of the karma discussions on this very site.
Very few people argued that Cato was corrupt. Even those who disagreed with him mostly didn’t.
I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people. You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.
I’d say that setting up incentives so that people within a system do culturally useful things out of their own self-interest is about as close to an opposite of corrupting people as we’re likely to find.
Doing X for specially crafted incentive Y for the intrinsic value of X is a form of corruption. It’s not always possible that all decisions are made for the intrinsic value but if you have a political enviroment where there a lot pressure to do Y’s.
Especially if you can’t get any political power without Y, you won’t have many people who persue political goals for their intrinsic value in your political system.
Things work much better when the politicians do what they consider to be right instead of having to do be coercied into taking any position that’s political advantageous.
That’s a… remarkably loose definition of corruption you’ve got going on there.
I’m not sure it’s practical to make a political system completely free of incentives, as long as you’re working with humans governing humans: the closest approximations I can think of would have to involve a leadership caste socially and economically isolated from the people they govern and without any means of improving their own welfare, and that’s so far removed from anything historical I know about that I don’t even want to try working out all its long-term implications. Imperial Japan’s about the closest, and that degenerated at first into proxy governance by provincial warlords and later into a military-aristocratic dictatorship ruling in the imperial family’s name but not in practice controlled by it.
Now, given anything resembling our existing politics, it seems naive to behave as if the default incentives surrounding political power are nonexistent or weak enough that they’re drowned out by altruistic impulses among those inclined to seek power—or even among random members of the populace, if you prefer direct democracy. This being the case, it makes far more sense to me to design systems to reward competent government—however defined—rather than to high-handedly dismiss any such attempts as unethical and rely wholly on the better angels of politicians’ natures.
I’m not quite prepared to say that there can’t exist any candidate systems where this wouldn’t be necessary, but if you’ve got a proposal like that, we should really be talking about that proposal rather than speaking in generalities.
I’m not sure such a thing has been proposed (after reading most, if not all of this thread); in fact it sounds so absurd that I can’t imagine what such a proposal would look like.
Maybe ChristianKI will correct me if he/she really is proposing a “political system completely free of incentives”.
In The Tamuli, by David Eddings, one country’s political system is described as an attempt to limit corruption. (The usual caveats regarding fictional evidence apply here, of course). In short, when a person is elected onto the ruling council of the Isle of Tega, all that he owns is sold, and the money is deposited into the country’s treasury. He is then simply not permitted to own anything until his term is up, some four years later (presumably food and housing is provided at the expense of the state); when that time comes, the money in the treasury is divided among the ministers in proportion to how much they put in (and the former ministers presumably start re-purchasing stuff). Note that the one thing that the ministers are not allowed to do is to change the tax rates.
This is described as having two consequences. First of all, the Isle of Tega is the only country that always shows a profit. Secondly, the minute that a man is nominated to become a minister, he is put under immediate armed guard to prevent him from running away (and remains under armed guard until his term is over). A government position is viewed with the same trepidation as a prison sentance.
Wouldn’t they still have incentives to aid parties who promise to repay them once their term is up? Similar to how some legislators conveniently acquire lucrative positions requiring little-to-no effort on their part from companies who they have helped out through the years once they’ve retired from politics?
Or to aid their families and friends, or to adopt policies that benefit their industry or hometown or social class—I considered similar systems when I was writing the ancestor (probably unconsciously influenced by Eddings; I haven’t read him in years, though), but decided that they were transparently unworkable.
Yes, it seems both too drastic, and not really able to accomplish the desired result.
Funny, I’ve wondered about a similarly drastic action though to improve the quality of voting, namely for each election select a random 1% (or some such—small enough to not crash the economy) of the population and lock them up with nothing to do but learn about what’s going on in the country and in the world and debate who they should vote for. In the end, unlike in the jury system, it should still be a secret ballot. Of course, if as many people were exempted as in jury duty, then it would be biased. One would have to see how much exemption was unavoidable, and and see whether the bias could be sufficiently minimized.
If it’s small enough not to crash the economy, then is it big enough to reliably alter the election results? And who provides the information for them to read through?
Only if they can trust the promise; once their term is up, the parties have little real incentive to stick to their promise, after all.
There will be an incentive to aid people who immediately donate a great big chunk of money to the State, as that money will be shared out among the ministers at the end of their term in any case; but the incentive only works, there, if the great big chunk of money is more than the state would obtain by other means.
In iterated games, defection has its price.
I see your point and, on further thought, acknowledge it as correct.
This seems like possibly quite a useful bit of abstraction and offer the potential of arguing the merits of a single principle that appears in many manifestations, in politics, corporations, volunteer organizations, etc. But I’m just having trouble getting it clearly in my head. Two things might help.
1) One or 2 concrete examples where you flesh out “X” and “Y”. I spent 2 years in a math Ph.D. program, which is long enough to know that to move forward with an abstraction, it is best to start with at least a couple of examples.
2) Consider the “agency problem” (or “principle-agent problem”), which to me seems the most promising abstraction for reasoning about corruption. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_problem, and maybe very close to what you’re aiming at.
Be sure to let us know when you find such people. One of the main conceits of this site is that rationalists should win. If it’s possible to get ahead by not being a rationalist (even temporarily), people are going to do that. Ultimately, I think what the original quote from Friedman boils down to is the old adage that you should try to fix the system rather than blame the people in it.