Posnit Ubek
I grew up in Amherst and I live in Toulouse. I try to be curious.
These posts represent points of light that have illuminated the dark corners of my understanding.
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A Key Quest of Human Existence
Adam Mastroianni, on why one shouldn't accept incentives as the main motivation for human behavior:
A key part of human development, I think, is figuring out what's right, what's wrong, and how you personally can increase the right and decrease the wrong to develop a value system.
This feels to me like a part and parcel of like the development of secondary sexual characteristics in adolescence — that happens, and meanwhile, you're also trying to do this thing.
This is part of the human mission as you go through life — to figure out "how do I slot into things? Like, where can I help? What's going wrong? How can I help something go right?"
And if you don't do that, if you outsource that process to a bureaucracy, to an incentive structure, to the ambient norms of the culture around you, you have declined a key quest of human existence.
And to me, that's just loser behavior… that is allowing someone else to colonize your value system in such a way that you are giving up this key part of your identity.
source: EconTalk Podcast