It is extremely interesting that money fails so hard at the one thing it should be good at, incentivizing behavior. I mean, yes, you'd get more content, but it would be hollow, as you say.
> It is extremely interesting that money fails so hard at the one thing it should be good at, incentivizing behavior.
Money itself doesn't fail to incentivize behavior. Rather, it is what you choose to reward with money that has be carefully chosen to incentivize the behaviors you want to encourage (via monetary reward).
It can be a good motivator and till be failing to serve any greater social purpose. People and organizations can get addicted to money exactly the same as people get addicted to sugar, nicotine, or cocaine. Addicts can be enormously tenacious, creative, and resourceful, but only to the end of feeding their addiction.
Totally agree. I was just taking issue with the blame on money specifically. Money is working as intended. The rules in which money is operating are fundamentally broken though, no doubt.
It could. Some people pursue it very aggressively, optimizing submission times and autoposting submissions of new papers or blog posts, for example. I recall one semi-spam account that was set up to submit anything relating to Ruby, including videos that happened to mention gemstones in the title.
Basically the same as the alignment problem in AI. You need to be very careful of how you define your rewards, because you'll end up incentivizing exactly what you define.
It is like Goodhart‘s Law (When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure) with an incentive attached to the measure. It probably needs to be in constant flux by design. Maybe a good thing as it would otherwise get rigid and boring.
This is also prevalent with the way that Google incentivizes page content structure now. I have to get 3/4 the way through a page before I find what I'm looking for because they encourage this big kitchen sink posts.
