Comment by AnthonyMouse
2 days ago
> Complex society is a potent counterargument to this hypothesis.
Complex society is the demonstration of that hypothesis. Misaligned incentives are widespread and corruption and inefficiency are the result.
> Systems that rely on good people to work are fundamentally flawed. Instead, the game has to be about aligning self interets in favour of the collective.
But now you're making a different argument.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" works by random chance. When Evil Corp pays off Candidate A and Pollution Inc pays off Candidate B and then it's Candidate B who gets in and retaliates against Evil Corp for backing the wrong horse, you're getting a good result by chance rather than by design. All it would have taken was for Candidate A to make a better prediction about whether they need to bend the knee to Pollution Inc too in order to win and the same system produces something even worse.
How to actually get their incentives to align is an extremely unsolved problem. The best method we know if is to subject them to competition, e.g. break up concentrated markets and place strong limits on what lawmaking can happen centrally, leaving everything possible to state and local governments while allowing people free choice in where they live, so that no one is forced to stay in the jurisdictions that make the worst choices. But the forces of corruption want the exact opposite of that, and have been gaining ground.
> Complex society is the demonstration of that hypothesis. Misaligned incentives are widespread and corruption and inefficiency are the result.
Of course they are. But aligned self-interest powers co-operation beyond kin relations and altruism.
> "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" works by random chance
Orthogonal concept.
> How to actually get their incentives to align is an extremely unsolved problem
No? It's the story of civilisation. Concepts like taxation; deterrence through corporal punishment, jailing and fines; paying salary for labour; hell, religion–these are all about aligning individual self interests with collective goals.
> best method we know if is to subject them to competition
I'd argue competition is more an optimiser on these primitives. Not a primitive per se.
> Orthogonal concept.
It's the sort of thing people generally mean when they say that someone acting in their own interest can be in your interest, and is the thing which is happening in the example from the thread.
> Concepts like taxation; deterrence through corporal punishment, jailing and fines; paying salary for labour; hell, religion–these are all about aligning individual self interests with collective goals.
And the practical implementations of all of those things are severely flawed to the point of questioning whether most of them are even net positive.
Taxes are supposed to benefit the public, and be paid with some fairness. In practice they go disproportionately to cronies or buying votes from affluent retirees, the tax code is so full of carve outs for special interests that it looks like swiss cheese and various political incentives cause it to impose severe benefits cliffs on lower middle income people that create poverty traps that benefit no one.
The criminal justice system on paper operates based on the rule of law, but the laws are so complex, overlapping and sparsely enforced that it really operates on whether a prosecutor is inclined to charge you with something. The results are mass incarceration and a system that enables a corrupt incumbent to use the threat of prosecution to extract favors.
The principal-agent problem inherent in hiring someone is well-known and is dramatically exacerbated by large organizational hierarchies that put long chains of inaccessible authority between the customer and the person ultimately doing the work.
Religion seems like a long debate but I don't think it would be controversial to assert that there have been issues there.
> I'd argue competition is more an optimiser on these primitives. Not a primitive per se.
Try to imagine any of the others operating without it. You have to pay taxes but have no alternatives on which jurisdiction to live in or who decides how much tax you pay or how the money is spent, what happens? You want to be hired or use the money you earn to buy something but there is only one employer and only one supplier of goods and services, what happens?
> sort of thing people generally mean when they say that someone acting in their own interest can be in your interest, and is the thing which is happening in the example from the thread
It's a single example of temporary alignment. Employment, citizenship and affiliation are non-kinship examples of more-durable bonds.
> the practical implementations of all of those things are severely flawed to the point of questioning whether most of them are even net positive
We can debate that. What we can't debate is whether they work. Complex societies exist and work. Everyone who has a choice makes the choice, dominantly, to stay in them.
> You have to pay taxes but have no alternatives on which jurisdiction to live in or who decides how much tax you pay or how the money is spent, what happens? You want to be hired or use the money you earn to buy something but there is only one employer and only one supplier of goods and services, what happens?
Sure. This is a modifier. It makes these other things work or not. Imagine a system with competition but no taxation. You lose public services. Same for competition without private employment–you're in a totalitarian state with a monopsony on labour.
3 replies →
> aligned self-interest
The qualifier tells you exactly what you're overlooking. self-interest, aside for some narrow exceptions, is often in conflict with collective interest. 1 Million to me is always better than a 1 Million split with everyone.
> self-interest, aside for some narrow exceptions, is often in conflict with collective interest
Often, but not always. Successful societies amplify that exception. The whole notion of non-kinship based societies rests on mastering this alignment. When it collapses, so does the civilisation.
> 1 Million to me is always better than a 1 Million split with everyone
The benefits of co-operation mean the real trade-off is 1 million split five ways versus 100 to me. This was almost untrue in the age of conquest. It became barely true with industrialisation. It's massively true in the information age.
10 replies →