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.

Be careful not to use "bitterness is bad" as a way to indulge in anti-epistemology, e.g.

"If I thought that humanity doesn't care about its own future, then I'd be bitter, and bitterness is bad, ergo humanity does, in fact, care about its own future"

Yes, but "humanity cares about its own future" is such a vague statement that you can accurately believe it either way, depending on how you interpret it. So I don't see anything wrong with interpreting it so as to be less bitter.

5Richard_Kennaway16y

Negative emotions are to me a warning sign, not to avoid some truth, but to uncover some falsehood.

4[anonymous]16y

Did my response look like that? I was trying to convey the idea that you can use existing factors in society to achieve the goals you want, even if humanity doesn't care about the goals. In the first case it was leveraging disease prevention and then relying on the use of medical technology for self-enhancement that has happened previously (which I elided). The benefits of following that path is determined by how much you think that people not being interested in existential risk reduction is due to their brains shutting down when people talk to them about it and how much you think it is due to conflicts with their other interests. I'd guess a little of both, but probably more interests. That we have lots of smart people here, suggests that there is something in humanity that can become interested in existential risk reduction given sufficient brain power. So I wouldn't expect a vast awakening, but I think it would help the cause. To give another example of how you might achieve your goals even if society doesn't share them. Take aging, if Aubrey de Grey could get some of his proposed techniques to work on just the skin of humans and actually keep skin healthy and young (even while we degrade on the inside), he would get mountains of cash from the many women who want to keep looking young. Admittedly he couldn't muck around with marrow and things (I forget his exact plans), but he should be able to do better than the current "anti-aging creams". Then he needs to find another group of people that want to keep their muscles young (men?). And do it piecemeal. At no point relying on people wanting to live forever. Think sneakier :)

3

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

3

3

3

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

3

3