Incentives vs agency—is this an attribution fallacy (and if so, in what direction)?
Most of the time, when I see people discussing incentives about LW participation (karma, voting, comment quality and tone), we’re discussing average or other-person incentives, not our own. When we talk about our own reasons for participation, it’s usually more nuanced and tied to truth-seeking and cruxing, rather than point-scoring.
I don’t think you can create alignment or creative cooperation with incentives. You may be able to encourage it, and you can definitely encourage surface-cooperation, which is not valueless, but isn’t what you actually want. CF variants of Goodheart’s law—incentive design is _always_ misguided due to this, as visible incentives are _always_ a bad proxy for what you really want (deep and illegible cooperation).
There’s two sides of discussing incentives, wrt. X:
Incentivize X/Make tools that make it easier for people to do X [1].
Get rid of incentives that push people to not do X[2] /Remove obstacles to people doing X.
Even if alignment can’t be created with incentives, it can be made easier. I’m also curious about how the current incentives on LW are a bad proxy right now.
[1] There’s a moderation log somewhere (whatever that’s for?), GW is great for formatting things like bulleted lists, and we can make Sequences if we want.
[2] For example, someone made a post about “drive by criticism” a while back. I saw this post, and others, as being about “How can we make participating (on LW) easier (for people it’s hard for right now)?”
Incentives vs agency—is this an attribution fallacy (and if so, in what direction)?
Most of the time, when I see people discussing incentives about LW participation (karma, voting, comment quality and tone), we’re discussing average or other-person incentives, not our own. When we talk about our own reasons for participation, it’s usually more nuanced and tied to truth-seeking and cruxing, rather than point-scoring.
I don’t think you can create alignment or creative cooperation with incentives. You may be able to encourage it, and you can definitely encourage surface-cooperation, which is not valueless, but isn’t what you actually want. CF variants of Goodheart’s law—incentive design is _always_ misguided due to this, as visible incentives are _always_ a bad proxy for what you really want (deep and illegible cooperation).
There’s two sides of discussing incentives, wrt. X:
Incentivize X/Make tools that make it easier for people to do X [1].
Get rid of incentives that push people to not do X[2] /Remove obstacles to people doing X.
Even if alignment can’t be created with incentives, it can be made easier. I’m also curious about how the current incentives on LW are a bad proxy right now.
[1] There’s a moderation log somewhere (whatever that’s for?), GW is great for formatting things like bulleted lists, and we can make Sequences if we want.
[2] For example, someone made a post about “drive by criticism” a while back. I saw this post, and others, as being about “How can we make participating (on LW) easier (for people it’s hard for right now)?”