Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?

Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by whimsicalism on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:48PM (#27475631)

I think the type of person who tends to browse HN has a problem with latching on to phrases or ideas that "sound interesting" and then never doing any further research. I think it's where a lot of the rhetoric around 'elite overproduction' comes from.

> Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever.

Why would that incentivize colleges to enroll more students? How does college as real estate speculation business work?

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Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by ashtonkem on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:51PM (#27475674)

You can disagree with the podcast without attacking me.

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Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by whimsicalism on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:52PM (#27475684)

I'm attacking myself as much as you, I have this problematic tendency to latch onto interesting sounding ideas.

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Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by ChainOfFools on Friday June 11, 2021 @02:00PM (#27476544)

universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains find compression irresistible, to the point of self-dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly collapsed reality is encountered.

even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.

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Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by v-erne on Friday June 11, 2021 @05:11PM (#27478551)

I believe saying that our mental models are mere models and not reality would be a bit shorter, profound and usefull :)

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Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by ChainOfFools on Friday June 11, 2021 @05:32PM (#27478767)

maybe, but I try to avoid (or at least subordinate) phasing that implies a dualist distinction between the real and the mental. even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?

such contextualization does indeed impair portability...

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Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by v-erne on Saturday June 12, 2021 @09:40AM (#27484405)

>> even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?

That's quite materialistic take - I think the jury is still out on whether mind is inseparable from material reality (even if we treat it only as an emergent phenomena)

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Re:Incentives in economics are wrong, but how? by ChainOfFools on Saturday June 12, 2021 @03:35PM (#27486917)

(speaking for myself here) s/materialist/monist, in which everything is considered, not material as such, but rather as emergent phenomena of differentials in causality feedback cycles.

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