“Behavior is determined by incentives.”
…Incentive determinism is obvious. It’s just a bunch of tautologies: we are who we are, we want what we want, and we do what we’re caused to do. And yet, barely anybody thinks this way. It’s a cold, alien way of thinking.
Instead, we prefer to think in stories. We see the world as revolving around a colorful cast of characters—often representing warring tribes—whom we either like or dislike.
We infer people’s character traits by the words they use and in what order they use them. When everyone uses this shortcut to identify the baddies, the result is what Robin Hanson calls “righttalkism,” the view that all it takes to improve the world is to change how people talk. The logic is straightforward:
Bad things are caused by bad people.
Good things are caused by good people.
Bad people are bad because they talk the wrong way.
Good people are good because they talk the right way.
Therefore, if everybody talks the right way and nobody talks the wrong way, then everything will be good.
This is essentially what modern discourse is all about. We’re trying to get people to talk the right way and prevent them from talking the wrong way. We spend very little time discussing which incentive structures are the best, and tons of time talking about which sets of words are the right words and which sets of people are the right people. It’s why we write words at all: we think we’re the right people with the right words, and if we just say those words loudly enough, we’ll improve the world.
