> But there is a feedback loop: If you change the incentive structures, people’s behaviors will certainly change, but subsequently so, too, will those incentive structures.
This is a good point, and somewhat subtle too. Something that worries me is the acceleration of the feedback loop. The Internet, social media, smartphones, and now generative AI are all things that changed how information is generated, consumed and distributed, and changing that affects the incentive structures and behaviors of the people interacting with that information.
But information is spread increasingly faster, in higher amounts and with higher noise, and so the incentives landscape keeps shifting continuously to keep up, without giving people time to adapt and develop immunity against the viral/parasitic memes that each landscape births.
And so the (meta)game keeps changing under our feet, increasingly accelerating towards chaos or, more worryingly, meta-stable ideologies that can survive the continuous bombardment of an adversarial memetic environment. I say worryingly, because most of those ideologies have to be, by definition, totalizing and highly hostile to anything outside of them.
The problem is quite the opposite: a large part of the incentive structure is effectively static. Our biological makeup hardly changes, so we're still drawn to all kinds of primitive things. Without strong cultural overrides we are sitting ducks, ready to be exploited by click and engagement bait.
With an analogy: Connecting an average human to social media is like connecting a Windows 95 machine to the internet.
This is a good point, and somewhat subtle too. Something that worries me is the acceleration of the feedback loop. The Internet, social media, smartphones, and now generative AI are all things that changed how information is generated, consumed and distributed, and changing that affects the incentive structures and behaviors of the people interacting with that information.
But information is spread increasingly faster, in higher amounts and with higher noise, and so the incentives landscape keeps shifting continuously to keep up, without giving people time to adapt and develop immunity against the viral/parasitic memes that each landscape births.
And so the (meta)game keeps changing under our feet, increasingly accelerating towards chaos or, more worryingly, meta-stable ideologies that can survive the continuous bombardment of an adversarial memetic environment. I say worryingly, because most of those ideologies have to be, by definition, totalizing and highly hostile to anything outside of them.
So yeah, interesting times.