[Solvency]

i've never seen the word incentive used more in my life than on hacker news. Is there some famous tech talk by a programming idol that involved the word incentive that's caused it to become such a weird fixture in this community? Sure, the entire world can be reduced down to a laundry list of incentives. But that's also incredibly reductionist, generic, and boring.

[everforward]

I think it’s a tendency to analyze everything as a system. Incentives are basically a pros and cons list but over an aggregate of people.

I don’t find it reductionist. Incentives don’t have to be monetary. Power, status, family, morality, societal pressures, personal satisfaction, fear, all can be incentives.

Incentives are a question of what shared experience is a driving factor for a group of people.

That doesn’t remove the nuance from individuals. Just because group X lacks incentive to do Y doesn’t mean that nobody in X does Y. It’s just less useful to speak about individuals. No one cares about why my uncle Rick did whatever, but they might care why 10% of the country is doing it.

[futureshock]

I think it gets used a lot here because it’s a compact way to say “the world works in the way that it does because we have set it up to reward certain things and punish other things. This isn’t a static feature of reality, but something we are choosing as a society and can change.”

Don’t see it as reductionist, more like a callout that we’re dealing with a social feature, not some physical law.

[Solvency]

"why do octopi have camouflaging capabilities? because of natural incentives!"

it's essentially a trite truism/platitude. you can apply it to everything and if you don't want to delve deeper, why say it.

[futureshock]

I think that’s incorrect. octopi have camouflage because of natural selection.

Incentives are things that humans create, intentionally or unintentionally. There are the selection pressure of the human cultural world but they are the opposite of natural. They are the things we can choose to change. By calling them out, we implicitly question if we should be changing them.

It can end up being a bit pseudo-intellectual on HN (say it ain’t so!), but there is a real rhetorical context in which it makes sense to talk about incentives.