Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer.

Roko

I'm trying to better understand the relationship between incentivization and rationality, and it occurred to me that it is a "folk fact" around here that large financial incentives don't make cognitive biases go away.

However, I can't seem to find any papers that actually say this. It's not easy to google for (I have tried) so I wonder if the Less Wrong collective memory knows how to find the papers?

Is there a pattern to which biases go away with incentivization? Do we have at least 5 examples of biases that go away with incentivization and 5 examples that don't go away with incentivization?

As an incentive, I'll paypal $10 to the commenter whose answer is least biased and most useful.

However, I can't seem to find any papers that actually say this. It's not easy to google for (I have tried) so I wonder if the Less Wrong collective memory knows how to find the papers?

Is there a pattern to which biases go away with incentivization? Do we have at least 5 examples of biases that go away with incentivization and 5 examples that don't go away with incentivization?

As an incentive, I'll paypal $10 to the commenter whose answer is least biased and most useful.

I think that maybe there is an analogous pair of statements for contrarian viewpoints.

The "Strong anti-contrarian hypothesis" -- the world contains no severe commons problems and is generally being run rationally and well

The "Weak anti-contrarian Hypothesis" -- there are no opportunities for an individual or small group to actually benefit from (or even stand a non-negligible chance of succeeding at) solving the severe commons problems and irrationalities that we do have.

Right, and my position is the strong pro-contrarian hypothesis. There are visibly countless opportunities for extremely but boundedly irrational individuals to benefit from solving commons problems, therefore almost no-one is extremely irrational but boundedly so for an extremely permissive bound, almost everyone is even more irrational than that.

One of my best data-points is that so few people did the obvious and invested in Buffett once he had the best track-record of any other investor 35 years ago. With some leverage, any such people who started out ... (read more)

6Roko16y

E.g. It takes a mere smart person to realize that spending $10^10 on designing new kinds of lipstick and spending $0 on curing aging is not a sane allocation of effort. But if you try to actually correct that failure, you end up locked away in an underfunded lab on a shoestring budget, poor and ridiculed by the very people you're trying to help, who go on with the old plan whilst deriding your publicly as immoral and selfish.