Incentives are for losers

We can all agree: the incentives are bad.

我们都同意：激励措施很糟糕。

Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing.

无论你看哪里，人们都会因为做错事而受到奖励。

This has become the go-to diagnosis for every problem, from climate change to political polarization to scientific malfeasance—“sorry pal, you’ve got a bad case of the incentives.”

I don’t disagree with this analysis, exactly.

确切地说，我并不反对这种分析。

Who could?

谁可以？

It’s basically tautological.

这基本上是同义反复。

“People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?

“人们做坏事是因为他们因为做坏事而受到鼓励和奖励。”好吧，不然你为什么要这么做呢？

My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise.

How could you be expected to break a rule, forego a promotion, or give up decimal of your grade point average, for the sake of—what?

你怎么可能会为了——什么而违反规则，放弃升职，或者放弃平均成绩的小数点？

Doing the right thing?

做正确的事？

There’s a point here that should go without saying, but instead it has simply gone unsaid.

这里有一点应该是不言而喻的，但它却没有被提及。

Which is: incentives are for losers .

即：激励是针对失败者的。

Doing something simply because an arbitrary reward system will give you a lil treat—that’s for pigeons, not people.

仅仅因为任意的奖励制度会给你带来一点好处而做某事——那是针对鸽子的，而不是针对人的。

If you build your life around satisfying incentives, then you’re a dummy and a schmuck.

如果你的生活建立在令人满意的激励之上，那么你就是一个傻瓜。

1

When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department.

当我在少年棒球联盟打了几年灾难性的比赛时，我最不喜欢的部分就是击球，因为你必须戴上当地娱乐部门提供的破旧的击球头盔。

None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you.

And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.

因此，每次击球不仅有被三振的风险，还有感染头虱的风险。

2

A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice.

一些认真的孩子带来了自己的头盔——定制的，装饰有高雅的贴花，并且可能含有零虱子。

These kids ran the bases like little princes.

这些孩子像小王子一样管理基地。

Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented.

任何错误的投球都会从他们的头上弹回来，不会造成任何伤害，让他们完美的头骨完好无损。

The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball .

I say all this because incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you.

我之所以这么说，是因为激励措施就像击球头盔：如果你不带自己的头盔，你就不得不使用为你提供的蹩脚头盔。

A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose.

人类发展的一个关键部分——事实上，也是人类发展中最人性化的部分——就是获得一个目标。

That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong.

这意味着要完善你的是非观念，并弄清楚你个人如何能够增加正确和减少错误。

Once your neural tube has ballooned into a brain, once you can poop without issue, conjugate irregular verbs, and feed yourself solid foods, you ought to ask yourself, “Why am I doing these things?” What’s it all for?

一旦你的神经管膨胀成大脑，一旦你可以毫无问题地排便，结合不规则动词，并给自己喂固体食物，你应该问自己，“我为什么要做这些事情？”这一切是为了什么？

How can I make myself useful?

我怎样才能让自己变得有用？

It’s fine if you’re still working on your answers to those questions.

如果您仍在寻找这些问题的答案，那很好。

It’s fine—and good!—if you have multiple answers, or if your answers change over time.

如果您有多个答案，或者您的答案随着时间的推移而改变，那就很好了！

But it’s not fine to pass on the questions entirely.

但完全转达问题并不好。

We owe these answer to each other, and we owe them to ourselves, because a sense of purpose is both prosocial and protective.

我们应该为彼此提供这些答案，我们也应该为自己提供这些答案，因为使命感既是亲社会的，也是保护性的。

If you have a void where your moral convictions should be, then that cavity of your personality will get filled up with tumorous desires—for money, power, fame, status.

This is the kind of person who “responds to incentives”.

这就是那种“对激励有反应”的人。

It took me a long time to understand this.

我花了很长时间才明白这一点。

In my early 20s, when I was at the bottom of every ladder that I aspired to ascend, I assumed the people at the top of those ladders must be pretty great.

在我 20 岁出头的时候，当我处于我渴望攀登的每一个阶梯的底部时，我认为那些阶梯顶部的人一定非常伟大。

How wise these incentive-maxxers must be, how cool and smart, to have the things that everybody else wants!

这些激励最大化者必须多么明智，多么冷静和聪明，才能拥有其他人想要的东西！

But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was.

They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had .

他们之所以显得令人羡慕，只是因为我是远远地看着他们，所以我只能看到他们拥有的东西。

Up close, when you can see what they are , it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool.

近距离观察，当你看到它们是什么时，你就会清楚地发现，这些梯子顶端的人中只有少数确实是明智和冷静的。

More often, they’re sniveling little twerps.

更多时候，他们是在哭泣的小傻瓜。

They’re spiritually chinless.

他们在精神上没有下巴。

They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing.

除了攀登阶梯之外，他们没有信念，没有激情，没有任何目的。

It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.

看着他们，这些人拥有一切，除了一件真正重要的事情，真是令人难过。

Often, these are the people who are most insistent that the incentives ought to be obeyed.

通常，这些人是最坚持应该遵守激励措施的人。

They are quick to swear that good grades, cash, prestige, etc. are inherently valuable, or that they are useful proxies for value.

他们很快就发誓，良好的成绩、现金、声望等本身就是有价值的，或者它们是价值的有用代表。

The incentive-obsessives feel this way because they have to.

痴迷于激励的人有这样的感觉是因为他们不得不这样做。

Like the government of a failing nation, they must swear that their currency is real, and they must lash out at anyone attempting to participate in an alternative economy, lest the whole fraud come crashing down upon itself.

就像一个失败国家的政府一样，他们必须发誓他们的货币是真实的，并且必须严厉打击任何试图参与替代经济的人，以免整个欺诈行为自行崩溃。

Without any formal instruction, approximately 100% of humans will learn to speak, and approximately 0% of humans will learn to read.

在没有任何正式指导的情况下，大约 100% 的人类将学会说话，大约 0% 的人类将学会阅读。

Talking comes easy and early, enabled by ancient mental structures that hoover up words and extract the meaning behind them.

古老的心理结构能够吸收单词并提取其背后的含义，因此说话变得轻松而早。

These are the original LLMs, and still the best in the known universe.

这些是最初的法学硕士，并且仍然是已知领域中最好的。

Reading, on the other hand, comes late and laboriously, piggybacking on bits of brain that were never meant to decode squiggles on paper, let alone comprehend Finnegans Wake .

So when thinking about any human ability, it’s useful to ask: is this more like speaking, or is it more like reading?

因此，在思考人类的任何能力时，有必要问一下：这更像是说话，还是更像阅读？

Is this an ancient capability that we get for free just by living long enough, or is this a modern skill that you can’t get without working for it?

Developing a value system seems to be a lot more like reading, because research suggests that many people don’t make it very far.

建立一个价值体系似乎更像是阅读，因为研究表明许多人并没有走得太远。

In the early 2000s, the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton asked hundreds of American teenagers about their religious beliefs.

2000 年代初期，社会学家克里斯蒂安·史密斯 (Christian Smith) 和梅琳达·伦德奎斯特·丹顿 (Melinda Lundquist Denton) 向数百名美国青少年询问了他们的宗教信仰。

What they got in return was a bunch of gobbledygook.

他们得到的回报是一堆官样文章。

Regardless of their supposed faith, few of these teens could say anything specific about the divine.

不管他们的信仰如何，这些青少年中很少有人能说出任何关于神的具体信息。

Most of them believed that God is like, this cool dude who floats in the sky and wants everybody to be happy and to get along, and if you ask him nicely he might help you achieve your goals, but otherwise he’s mostly busy floating.

他们中的大多数人相信上帝就像是一个很酷的家伙，漂浮在天空中，希望每个人都快乐并和睦相处，如果你善意地请求他，他可能会帮助你实现你的目标，但除此之外，他大部分时间都在忙于漂浮。

Fortunately, this celestial butler is not super specific about what you should and shouldn’t do, and he doesn’t really speak unless spoken to.

3

Smith and Denton came up with a name for this thin soup of theology: moralistic therapeutic deism .

史密斯和丹顿为这种神学稀汤想出了一个名字：道德治疗自然神论。

They only studied teenagers, but they suspect that many people remain moralistic therapeutic deists for their whole lives—after all, the teens probably picked up this loose handful of beliefs from their parents.

他们只研究了青少年，但他们怀疑许多人一生都是道德治疗自然神论者——毕竟，青少年可能从父母那里继承了这些松散的信仰。

People will claim on surveys that they belong to a certain religion, or they’ll get riled up about specific bits of dogma.

人们会在调查中声称自己属于某种宗教，或者会对特定的教条感到愤怒。

But if you dig into their beliefs at all, you’ll soon hit a gooey core of underbaked religious mishmash.

但如果你深入研究他们的信仰，你很快就会发现未成熟的宗教混杂的粘性核心。

4

I first encountered this research a decade ago, but when I revisited it recently, I realized something remarkable: this appears to be a rare case where sociologists and psychologists have discovered the same phenomenon by approaching it from different directions.

我十年前第一次接触到这项研究，但当我最近重新审视它时，我意识到了一些值得注意的事情：这似乎是社会学家和心理学家通过从不同方向研究同一现象而发现的罕见案例。

It’s like we started excavating on opposite sides of the Earth, and now we’ve finally clanged shovels.

就像我们开始在地球的两侧挖掘一样，现在我们终于敲响了铲子。

On the psychology side, we called this discovery the illusion of explanatory depth .

在心理学方面，我们将这一发现称为解释深度错觉。

As I’ve written before , people seem to understand the world exactly as well as they need to, and no better.

正如我之前所写，人们似乎对世界的理解完全符合他们的需要，而且没有更好。

Everyone knows how to use a toilet, for example, but they mistakenly think they also know how a toilet works .

例如，每个人都知道如何使用厕所，但他们错误地认为自己也知道厕所是如何工作的。

I think this illusion is inevitable, given the architecture of the mind.

我认为考虑到心灵的结构，这种错觉是不可避免的。

According to predictive processing theory , the mind is always trying to guess what’s going to happen next, and it only updates its guesses when its expectations don’t match its experience.

根据预测处理理论，大脑总是试图猜测接下来会发生什么，只有当它的期望与它的经验不符时，它才会更新它的猜测。

If you run that algorithm for a while, you’ll end up with a model of the world that is good enough, even if it’s not particularly good.

如果你运行这个算法一段时间，你最终会得到一个足够好的世界模型，即使它不是特别好。

You don’t notice the errors in your model until you run smack-dab into them, and every time you correct one, you assume that you’ve gotten them all.

你不会注意到模型中的错误，直到你轻轻一碰它们，并且每次纠正一个错误时，你都会认为你已经得到了所有这些错误。

From the sociology side, this same phenomenon can show up as something like moralistic therapeutic deism.

从社会学的角度来看，同样的现象可以表现为道德治疗自然神论。

People’s folk morality and folk religion, just like their folk physics, their folk biology, etc., are exactly as detailed as they need to be.

人们的民间道德和民间宗教，就像他们的民间物理学、民间生物学等一样，都非常详细。

Don’t hit, don’t steal, take turns, say please and thank you—almost everyone achieves this basic level of moral development, because otherwise you’ll end up friendless, if not incarcerated.

不打、不偷、轮流、说“请”和“谢谢”——几乎每个人都达到了道德发展的基本水平，因为否则你最终会失去朋友，甚至被监禁。

Similarly, almost everyone acquires some vague notion of an all-seeing, sky-dwelling God through simple osmosis.

同样，几乎每个人都通过简单的渗透获得了一些模糊的概念，即有一位无所不知、居住在天空的上帝。

(After all, He is kind of everywhere, literally and metaphorically.)

（毕竟，无论从字面上还是隐喻上来说，他无处不在。）

But beyond a handful of high-level principles, most folks remain mushy on the particulars.

但除了一些高级原则之外，大多数人对细节仍然糊涂。

Smith and Denton didn’t perform the whole illusion of explanatory depth protocol with their participants, but I’m willing to bet that everyone feels like they have a coherent system of ethical and religious beliefs right up until you ask them any specific questions.

史密斯和丹顿并没有对他们的参与者执行解释性深度协议的整个幻觉，但我敢打赌，每个人都觉得他们有一个连贯的道德和宗教信仰体系，直到你问他们任何具体问题。

Our value systems are flimsy for the same reason our scientific reasoning is flimsy: we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken.

我们的价值体系是脆弱的，就像我们的科学推理是脆弱的一样：我们不会修复我们的心理模型，直到有消息告诉我们它们已经被打破。

So unless your pastor is popping quizzes during the sermon and cold-calling people in the pews, and unless you find yourself thrust into various Trolley Problems on a regular basis, there’s nothing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and theological convictions.

因此，除非你的牧师在讲道期间进行测验，并对坐在座位上的人进行推销，并且除非你发现自己经常陷入各种电车难题，否则没有什么可以告诉你需要坚定你的道德和神学信念。

Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to?

当不必要的时候，为什么要花时间去思考是非、善恶、神圣与世俗等等呢？

You’re just going to get yourself into trouble, or even worse, into a philosophy PhD program.

你只会让自己陷入麻烦，甚至更糟糕的是，进入哲学博士课程。

This could explain why our sense of right and wrong is so easily overwritten by any half-decent system of rewards and punishments: we just don’t have much written there in the first place.

这可以解释为什么我们的是非感很容易被任何半正派的奖励和惩罚制度所覆盖：我们只是一开始就没有太多的文字记录。

So how does anyone ever develop a value system that’s more than a few bullet points?

那么，如何才能建立一个不仅仅是几个要点的价值体系呢？

I think, in short, that they look at a fish and they go insane.

简而言之，我认为他们看到一条鱼就会发疯。

You can summarize most of H.P.

你可以总结大部分 H.P.

Lovecraft’s short stories as “Guy looks at something so messed up that he goes totally bonkers.” “ Dagon ” was among Lovecraft’s first: it’s about a guy who gets marooned at sea and encounters a really freaky fish, which upsets him so much that he ultimately throws himself out a window.

洛夫克拉夫特的短篇小说是“盖伊看着如此混乱的事物，以至于完全疯了”。《大衮》是洛夫克拉夫特的第一部作品之一：讲述了一个被困在海上的人遇到了一条非常奇怪的鱼，这让他非常沮丧，最终他从窗户跳了下去。

This is a useful metaphor, because I think at the center of everyone’s psyche is some version of the Big Horrible Fish: some unexamined assumption that, if you fully considered it, would require you to upend a significant portion of your life.

这是一个有用的比喻，因为我认为每个人心灵的中心都是某种版本的“可怕的大鱼”：一些未经检验的假设，如果你充分考虑它，将需要你颠覆你生活的很大一部分。

I saw my fish in 2020 in San Fransisco, during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

2020 年，我在旧金山人格与社会心理学协会年会上看到了我的鱼。

5 Inside the conference hotel were dozens of talks about stereotyping, prejudice, inequality, and so on.

5 会议酒店内有数十场关于成见、偏见、不平等等问题的讨论。

That had never struck me as strange until that year, when outside of the hotel, which was in the middle of SF’s Tenderloin district, people were sprawled out on the sidewalk, dying of overdoses.

直到那一年，我才觉得这很奇怪，当时位于旧金山田德隆区中部的酒店外面，人们四肢摊开在人行道上，死于吸毒过量。

Scholars were scurrying past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is ironic because “scholars will scurry past homeless people to give talks on social justice” is literally the main finding from one of the most famous psychology studies of all time .

学者们匆匆走过无家可归的人，就社会正义发表演讲，这很讽刺，因为“学者们会匆匆走过无家可归的人，就社会正义发表演讲”实际上是有史以来最著名的心理学研究之一的主要发现。

6

Something un-clicked for me that day.

那天对我来说有些未点击的东西。

I had assumed that the answer to every dilemma was “more research”, and that eventually, all of the experiments being presented inside the hotel would solve the problems outside of it.

我曾以为解决每个困境的答案都是“更多研究”，最终，酒店内进行的所有实验都会解决酒店外的问题。

But as I ate canapés in a ballroom mere feet from so much misery, I started to wonder whether any of us were even trying to make progress, or whether we were just publishing papers.

I still believe that the barrier between us and a better world is a lack of knowledge; I’m just no longer convinced it’s that knowledge.

我仍然相信，我们与更美好世界之间的障碍是缺乏知识；我只是不再相信这就是知识。

I don’t think we will cure the human suffering visible on the streets of San Francisco by running another thousand studies on stereotype threat, ego depletion, and growth mindset , no matter what wonders it does for our CVs.

我不认为我们可以通过进行另外一千个关于刻板印象威胁、自我损耗和成长心态的研究来治愈旧金山街头可见的人类痛苦，无论它对我们的简历有什么奇迹。

I saw many more fish after that, of species varied and grotesque.

此后我又看到了更多的鱼，种类繁多，奇形怪状。

That’s why, on the rare occasions that I enter the conference hotel these days, my name badge does not have an academic affiliation on it, but instead simply says “guest”.

这就是为什么，这些天我很少进入会议酒店，我的名牌上没有任何学术背景，而只是写着“客人”。

When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered.

当我遇到一个非常正直的人，一个愿意不惜一切代价反抗激励的人时，我发现他们几乎总是看到鱼——又大又笨重的鱼，比我遇到过的任何鱼都大得多。

They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance to forge their own values.

他们经历了某种道德反思，消除了他们对哲学深度的幻想，并给了他们塑造自己价值观的机会。

They’re the kind of person who could go to the gallows with a witticism on their lips, the opposite of a loser.

他们是那种嘴上挂着俏皮话就可以上绞刑架的人，与失败者相反。

I used to see a guy like that every day, although he died a long time ago.

我以前每天都能看到这样的人，尽管他已经去世很久了。

Near the psychology department, there was a statue of Senator Charles Sumner, who is most famous for being beaten nearly to death by a congressman from the South in 1856.

心理学系附近有一座参议员查尔斯·萨姆纳 (Charles Sumner) 的雕像，他因 1856 年被一名南方国会议员差点殴打而闻名。

But that bit of historical trivia doesn’t do justice to the story of his life.

但这一点历史琐事并不能公正地描述他的一生。

Sumner grows up poor in Boston, living amongst the city’s considerable Black population.

萨姆纳在波士顿长大，生活贫困，生活在该市大量黑人人口中。

On a trip to France in the 1830s, he’s astounded to see Black and white students studying together as equals at the University of the Sorbonne.

在 1830 年代的法国之旅中，他惊讶地发现黑人和白人学生在索邦大学平等地一起学习。

He writes in his diary: “It must be then that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.” He later becomes the most outspoken white abolitionist of his generation, taking positions even his friends think are crazy: the complete and immediate freeing of all enslaved people, followed by Black suffrage 7 and racially integrated schools.

他在日记中写道：“那么，我们当中自由黑人和白人之间的距离一定是源于教育，而不是事物本质中存在的。”他后来成为这一代人中最直言不讳的白人废奴主义者，所采取的立场甚至连他的朋友都认为是疯狂的：立即彻底解放所有被奴役的人，其次是黑人选举权7和种族融合学校。

Then comes the infamous part: a few days after one of Sumner’s most inflammatory speeches, a congressman named Preston Brooks approaches Sumner at his desk on the Senate floor, accuses him of libel, and then to beats him with a cane until it breaks.

Sumner, caught by surprise, is tangled up in his desk and cannot escape; he nearly dies.

萨姆纳大吃一惊，被困在办公桌上无法逃脱。他差一点就死了。

But then he recovers, and when he does, he becomes even more provocative.

但当他恢复过来时，他变得更加挑衅。

In 1861, he pushes Lincoln to abolish slavery in the Confederacy, which causes the newspapers in Sumner’s home state of Massachusetts to call him “a candidate for the insane asylum”.

1861年，他推动林肯废除南部邦联的奴隶制，这导致萨姆纳家乡马萨诸塞州的报纸称他为“精神病院的候选人”。

(Two years later, Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation.) Sumner writes bills, arguments, and amendments that are often defeated or defanged, only for them to reappear 100 years later in Brown v.

（两年后，林肯发布了《解放黑奴宣言》。）萨姆纳撰写的法案、论点和修正案经常被否决或被毁掉，只是在 100 年后在《布朗诉黑人奴隶案》中再次出现。

Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

教育委员会和 1964 年民权法案。

8

All that to say: I am guessing somewhere on Beacon Hill, at the Sorbonne, and in the puddle of his own blood on the Senate floor, Sumner saw the fish, and he refused to look away.

I understand why so many people are so concerned with incentives.

我理解为什么这么多人如此关心激励措施。

It’s infuriating to watch villains succeed.

看到恶棍得逞真是令人气愤。

And look, if we can stop rewarding people for doing the wrong things, we obviously should.

看，如果我们能够停止奖励做错事的人，我们显然应该这样做。

But I don’t know if we can.

但我不知道我们是否可以。

Goodhart’s Law , Campbell’s Law, and their corollaries state that every incentive is destined to be corrupted eventually, and so far, no one has proven these conjectures wrong.

古德哈特定律、坎贝尔定律及其推论表明，每一种激励措施最终都注定会被腐蚀，到目前为止，没有人证明这些猜想是错误的。

That’s why discussions around incentives often sound to me like we’re talking about a monkey’s paw that will grant our wishes, but only in evil, ironic ways.

“The last time we made a wish on the Monkey’s Paw, it backfired horrifically.

“上次我们向猴爪许愿时，结果可怕地适得其反。

To rectify this, we have decided to make another wish on the Monkey’s Paw.”

为了纠正这个问题，我们决定向猴爪许下另一个愿望。”

In the eternal game of cat and mouse between the goodhearted people trying to fix the incentives and the Goodhart’d people trying to exploit the incentives, I am rooting for the cats.

We should check whether our incentive systems are having their intended effects, and we should revisit and revise them accordingly.

我们应该检查我们的激励制度是否达到了预期的效果，并进行相应的重新审视和修改。

But for some reason, the second we start talking in terms of incentives, we also start acting like courage doesn’t exist and can’t exist.

但出于某种原因，当我们开始谈论激励措施时，我们也开始表现得好像勇气不存在也不可能存在。

Bad incentives have become our generation’s version of “I was just following orders”, an excuse that should be an indictment.

不良激励已经成为我们这一代人版本的“我只是执行命令”，一个本应成为控诉的借口。

So we should try to get our incentives right, but also—incentives be damned, do the right thing .

因此，我们应该努力制定正确的激励措施，但同时——激励措施见鬼去吧，做正确的事。

If we seek an end to our permanent problems, we must cultivate in ourselves the same three things Charles Sumner said we should look for in a leader: “The first is backbone, the second is backbone and the third is backbone.”

Experimental History is still thinking about the glutes on that fish-god

实验历史仍在思考那个鱼神的臀肌

Shout out to this post from Tal Yarkoni and this tweet from Alice Maz, which I saw long ago and no doubt spiritually inspired this post:

赞扬塔尔·亚科尼 (Tal Yarkoni) 的这篇文章和爱丽丝·马兹 (Alice Maz) 的这篇推文，我很久以前就看到了，毫无疑问，这篇文章在精神上启发了我：

Only morons and cowards “respond to incentives.” Healthy people do what they want to do if reasonably practical, great people do what they want to do no matter what.

只有白痴和懦夫才会“对激励做出反应”。健康的人会做他们想做的事，如果相当实际的话，伟大的人无论如何都会做他们想做的事。

It was understood that these helmets, with their gnawed and rotted foam, would offer little protection if you actually got beamed in the head with a baseball.

Their role was more ceremonial than functional, like a chef’s toque or a pope’s mitre.

他们的角色更多的是仪式性而非功能性，就像厨师的无边帽或教皇的法冠。

As one participant in Smith and Denton’s study, a Muslim boy from California, put it:

正如史密斯和丹顿研究的一位参与者、一位来自加利福尼亚州的穆斯林男孩所说：

God is like an entity that decides when, if, he wants to intervene with a lot of things.

上帝就像一个实体，决定何时、是否想要干预很多事情。

To me God is pretty much like intervention, like extreme luck.

对我来说，上帝就像干预，就像极端的运气。

Say you’re $50 away from something and you find $50 on the floor, then that’s probably God’s intervention or something like that.

假设你距离某物有 50 美元，而你发现地板上有 50 美元，那么这可能是上帝的干预或类似的事情。

But other than that it just seems like he’s monitoring.

但除此之外，他似乎只是在监视。

He just kind of stays back and watches, like he’s watching a play, like he’s a producer.

他只是留下来观看，就像他在看一场戏剧，就像他是一名制片人一样。

He makes the play all possible and then he watches it, and if there’s something he doesn’t like, he changes it.

他让戏剧成为可能，然后他观看，如果有什么他不喜欢的地方，他就会改变它。

Survey research reaches a similar conclusion.

调查研究得出了类似的结论。

For example, Catholics and Protestants spent several centuries murdering each other over doctrinal disputes.

例如，天主教徒和新教徒花了几个世纪的时间因教义争端而互相残杀。

Today, however, only about half of Catholics know that they, unlike the Protestants, are supposed to believe in transubstantiation—that the bread and wine used in mass become the literal body and blood of Jesus.

Meanwhile, about half of Protestants don’t know who Martin Luther was .

与此同时，大约一半的新教徒不知道马丁·路德是谁。

It took place in February, just before covid really kicked off in the US.

事情发生在二月份，就在新冠病毒在美国真正爆发之前。

I remember my advisor cautioning me not to go, and I dismissed him, citing the standard armamentarium of psychological biases: focusing illusion, scope neglect, availability heuristic.

When I delivered my apology to him, it had to be over Zoom.

当我向他道歉时，事情必须通过 Zoom 进行。

In the 1970s, a pair of psychologists recruited a bunch of seminary students to give a short lecture, either about career opportunities for seminary graduates, or about the story of the Good Samaritan.

Some of them were told that they were late to give their lecture and they should hurry, or they were told they were on time or early.

他们中的一些人被告知他们演讲迟到了，他们应该快点，或者他们被告知他们准时或提前。

On their way to the building where they were supposed to deliver their talk, all the participants passed by a man slumped over in a doorway, groaning and coughing in the December cold.

The participants in the “hurry” condition were less likely to stop and help; the content of their talk did not matter.

处于“匆忙”状态的参与者不太可能停下来提供帮助；他们谈话的内容并不重要。

As is common for studies from this era, there aren’t enough participants to be certain these results are robust, but I’m optimistic you could find an effect like this again.

For men, anyway.

无论如何，对于男人来说。

Sadly, Sumner was never much of an advocate for women.

可悲的是，萨姆纳从来都不是女性的倡导者。

His biographer suggests he was probably gay, and he may have had some resentments toward the opposite sex.

他的传记作者暗示他可能是同性恋，而且他可能对异性有一些怨恨。

He exchanged saucy letters with a male friend of his, and was despondent when that friend married.

他和他的一个男性朋友交换了俏皮的信件，当那个朋友结婚时，他感到沮丧。

Sumner himself remained a bachelor until in his 50s, only to have his wife immediately start cheating on him openly and then dump him a few months later.

She told everybody he was impotent, which gave his political enemies no end of ammunition.

她告诉所有人他无能为力，这给了他的政敌无穷无尽的弹药。

Sources for this section here , here , and here .

本节的来源位于此处、此处和此处。

For more, see this 600-page biography that came out last year .

欲了解更多信息，请参阅去年出版的这本 600 页的传记。

I feel like there's an important distinction missing here between artificially manufactured incentives and the sort of intrinsic incentives baked into various features of the universe.

"Obeying" someone else's reward system that they created to get you to act a certain way is one thing, while living in accordance with what makes your body feel good and healthy is quite different

“服从”别人为让你以某种方式行事而创建的奖励系统是一回事，而按照让你的身体感觉良好和健康的方式生活则完全不同

Yes yes I absolutely and massively agree --- IN the sphere of Very Important Things.

是的，是的，我绝对非常同意——在非常重要的事情领域。

However in every day bits and pieces I don't want to have to stop and think to reinvent the wheel for every little system.

然而，在每一天的点点滴滴中，我不想停下来思考为每个小系统重新发明轮子。

I kind of want other parts of the distributed specialized machine of Civilisation to have worked out things for me, things like traffic flows and crowd safety at stadiums.

我有点希望文明的分布式专用机器的其他部分能够为我解决一些问题，比如体育场的交通流量和人群安全。

I want to be able to drift out half unaware and for the markings on the floor to direct me in a safe and convenient way.

我希望能够在不知不觉中漂流出去，并让地板上的标记以安全、方便的方式引导我。

It would be good if I didn't have to go out of my way to do that.

如果我不必特意这样做就好了。

Seems like a similar concept

似乎是类似的概念