## Incentives are for losers > ⁠We can all agree: the incentives are bad. Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. 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. Who could? It’s basically tautological. “People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them? > > 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? Doing the right thing? ### And also, > You can summarize most of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories as “Guy looks at something so messed up that he goes totally bonkers.” “[Dagon](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/d.aspx)” 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. > ![[33b619d1-6355-4aab-bf62-da86f0de954d_600x780.webp]] >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. by [Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History]([https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/incentives-are-for-losers))