108 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 9 Mar \ parent \ on: Incentives and coordination to solve hard problems mostly_harmless
I left out intrinsic incentives, which we don't seem to account for in our societal system design much, but maybe that's part of the problem.
I'm completely untrained here, but my understanding is that we partition motivation into intrinsic and extrinsic forms. Financial and reputational motivations are extrinsic subforms. What are the intrinsic subforms?
Ha! Yes. This is an extra-hard problem, I think, because:
a) economic incentives are not only generally useless for vitally important classes of endeavor, but counter-productive to it, and
b) we have no good way of non-economic incentive-design that our civilization can manage anymore -- religion being both perverted and largely ineffectual to current sensibilities; and nothing else seriously on offer.
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R&D labs are mostly motivated by these non-extrinsic incentives too as far as I can tell. If a stable financial life is harder to achieve now than it was in the golden age of R&D labs, maybe we are scrambling too much to pursue intrinsic things. That's probably my bias though.
Another view: the hard problems, absent AI, were so hard R&D couldn't reliably spinoff extrinsic things so we stopped building R&D labs.
This is sort of consistent with one of Theil's theories for why we are stagnating.
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It’s hard to separate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
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