Written: May 26, 2018 | Released: June 11, 2021
In my view, fundamental incentive misalignment affects many parts of society.
Companies:
There are many ways to make money that are net harmful to the world (e.g., see here for 13 ways).
Non-profits:
(1) The people that sponsor the work of a non-profit organization aren’t the ones that benefit from it.
(2) Donors can’t easily tell how much benefit their donation caused the organization to create.
(3) The act of marketing effectively to people to attract their donations is usually quite different from the act of helping people.
Democratic government:
(1) What is good for the world in the long term is not necessarily what is good for it during one political term.
(2) What is good for the entire country is not necessarily what is good for a politician’s core constituents.
(3) What is most helpful is not necessarily what sounds most appealing to voters.
(4) What is good for one country is sometimes bad for the world.
Science:
(1) Getting papers published in top journals does not necessarily require discovering non-obvious, or potentially useful, or even true things.
(2) Trivially new results, trendy but useless results, or false positives, may be almost as publishable but much easier to produce.
Education:
(1) Getting children to behave in class, perform well on tests in traditional academic subjects, or pass to the next grade, is only somewhat related to turning them into happy, helpful, intelligent, self-sufficient, effective adults.
(2) You can optimize for the former things while having very little impact (or even a negative impact in some cases) on the latter things.
Ourselves:
(1) Doing what feels good or easy now is different from doing what benefits us in the long term (e.g., denying our weaknesses is often much more pleasant than working to understand and correct them).
(2) Doing what is “right” for others or the world is, in plenty of cases, not the same as doing what benefits us.
(3) What the truth is, quite often, conflicts with what we want to believe is true.
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