Here are a couple specific ways I expect that lumping these cases together will case bad decisions (Raemon’s comment helped me articulate this):
If you don’t notice that some character types are stable under pressure, you’ll overestimate the short-run power of incentives relative to selection effects. You can in fact ask people to act against their “incentives” (example: the Replication Project, whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, people who return lost wallets) when conditions permit such people to exist, though this only lasts intergenerationally if longer-run incentives point the other way. What you can’t do is expect people in particular positions where there’s strong selection for certain traits, to exhibit incompatible traits. (Related: Less Competition, More Meritocracy?, No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you)
If you assume learning and responding to pressure are the same, you’ll put yourself in a position where you’re forced to do things way more than is optimal. In hindsight, instead of going for a master’s degree in math and statistics, I wish I’d (a) thought about what math I was curious about and tried to take the least-effort path to learning it, and (b) if I had motivation problems, examined whether I even wanted to learn the math, instead of outsourcing motivation to the academic system and my desire (more precisely, anxiety) to pass tests. I massively underinvested in playing with or other low-pressure high-intrinsic-motivation exploration of things I was just … interested in. (Related: The Costs of Reliability, The Order of the Soul).
Here are a couple specific ways I expect that lumping these cases together will case bad decisions (Raemon’s comment helped me articulate this):
If you don’t notice that some character types are stable under pressure, you’ll overestimate the short-run power of incentives relative to selection effects. You can in fact ask people to act against their “incentives” (example: the Replication Project, whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, people who return lost wallets) when conditions permit such people to exist, though this only lasts intergenerationally if longer-run incentives point the other way. What you can’t do is expect people in particular positions where there’s strong selection for certain traits, to exhibit incompatible traits. (Related: Less Competition, More Meritocracy?, No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you)
If you assume learning and responding to pressure are the same, you’ll put yourself in a position where you’re forced to do things way more than is optimal. In hindsight, instead of going for a master’s degree in math and statistics, I wish I’d (a) thought about what math I was curious about and tried to take the least-effort path to learning it, and (b) if I had motivation problems, examined whether I even wanted to learn the math, instead of outsourcing motivation to the academic system and my desire (more precisely, anxiety) to pass tests. I massively underinvested in playing with or other low-pressure high-intrinsic-motivation exploration of things I was just … interested in. (Related: The Costs of Reliability, The Order of the Soul).