46 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. The municipality and the city also benefited from the self-organised management of public servicesthat are the responsibility of the municipality.
      • for: community groups - incentives for municipal government support

      • Comment

        • Municipalities have a vested interest to partner with local community groups. They benefit because community groups can take a part of the workload off the shoulders of municipal workers including:
          • increased security leading to less crime
          • sharing un-needed items reduces waste
          • taking responsibility for public spaces can reduce fire hazard, reduce city labor costs, improve tourism
      • comment

        • In a South African context
          • helping neighbors in disenfranchised communities can
            • reduce conflict
            • increase security
            • increase food security
            • save money through donation of unused items
  2. Oct 2023
    1. incentive-misalignment problem

      This is provably wrong. 1. Less power-hungry chips are in high demand thanks to mobile computing. 2. Manufacturers keep touting how much less power they consume. 3. Greater power costs greater money. So the incentives are aligned.

  3. Sep 2023
  4. May 2023
    1. Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down – infrastructures exist for a specific purpose and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. If it is possible the organisation (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.

      {Formal Incentives]

  5. Nov 2022
    1. Such people  can’t conceive of a world different from the one they occupy. A world where their “tech skills” are useless because humanity actually made progress.

      oof. but beautiful encapsulation of incentives (or lack thereof) to promote actual change, vs just "working with what we have"

  6. Mar 2022
    1. Technology itself is culture, and a phone or a laptop or an algorithmic feed is in itself a cultural object just as worthy of analysis, critique, and serious attention as any piece of artwork or fashion trend.

      See technology more critical -- it shapes culture more so than anything else these days. And every tech product is deliberately designed to be the way it is.

    1. are halting deliveries to Russia to comply with sanctions.

      Interesting, at least some of the companies pausing business in Russia are forced to do so through the sanctions by the US government.

    1. This is what free societies converging on an idea looks like.

      Or political pressure being applied to every company (from people, not the government). Suspending business in Russia costs less than the repetitional hit of continuing there.

      Though arguable that's the same as a "free convergence on an idea" -- since such pressure only exists when many people agree on something.

  7. Feb 2022
    1. Paul Graham argued in 2005 (just before starting YCombinator) why venture capital is traditionally unfriendly to founders, and how it sets itself bad incentives.

    1. Making changes or additions to the standard library was as easy as making changes to my own code

      For many people, making changes to code at all is hard. The few times I remember actually forking a library to add functionality, it meant hours reading into the codebase and polishing my change to commit it upstream.

      I like the author's argument, but it's not not just the friction to view source code -- many technical architectures are also needlessly complex or non-standard.

    1. Learnings: - Take a lesson from good hill climbing algorithms, and drop yourself in unfamiliar situations to find your career maximum. - Progress in artificial games (e.g. career ladders) is fun, but you're likely to miss the bigger picture.

    1. One source described the Q&A as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at extracting some kind of accountability from Stadia management.

      There is no accountability to people inside corporations, only to results. Which is working as intended, companies are meant to make money by serving customers, not employees.

      The simple "truth" here is that these Stadia games likely wouldn't have been successful without a lot of additional investments.

  8. Jan 2022
    1. Depuis longtemps, je suis d’avis que la rigueur d’un cours ne se mesure pas à la quantité de connaissances dont l’enseignant fait étalage, mais aux apprentissages que les étudiants font.

      Which can lead to an assessment of pedagogical efficacy. It's funny, to me, that those who complain about "grade inflation" (typically admins) rarely entertain the notion that grades could be higher than usual if the course went well. The situation is quite different in "L&D" (Learning and Development, typically for training and professional development in an organizational context). "Oh, great! We were able to get everyone to reach the standard for this competency! Must mean that we've done something right in our Instructional Design!"

  9. Oct 2021
    1. The strike was likely authorized by Paris and Washington, both of which have warned several times against Hezbollah circumventing the state to provide a solution to the fuel crisis themselves.

      Fight over who gets to provide a solution to crisis: that is amazing perspective... if you try to help, we'll spend resources that could be pooled into helping to undermine your efforts to help and kill you for trying.

    2. Until recently, smugglers were purchasing fuel at a Lebanese central bank-subsidized rate and selling it for profit to both the Syrian government and to rebel groups. Realizing these subsidies were a perverse incentive, and to help preserve Lebanon’s diminishing foreign currency reserves, the central bank rescinded the subsidies back in July causing fuel prices to skyrocket

      Fuel arbitrage incentives; creates another security problem requiring additional resources (and fuel / water) to deal with (ie combatting smugglers (aka entrepreneurs))

    1. This sounds like a grim reality and indeed it is. But it has a silver lining. Since the people are the property of the regime, the people are the assets of the regime. The regime’s incentive is therefore to maintain and improve this human capital. Note that this incentive is precisely aligned with the traditional maxim of state: salus populi suprema lex, the health of the people is the supreme law.

      Hinges on a word / interpretation. But then how the regime decides to control social/cultural values matters a lot too - what fields of industry are even allowed to exist, for instances, dictates the culture of the society, the degree of choice & freedom. Gov could be perfectly humane in its implementation of what jobs there are, while being simultaneously freedom-limiting

    2. When price is fixed, the market competes only on quality. The highest-quality providers can choose their clients, and may have waiting lists; the lowest-quality providers have to hustle hard not to fall out of the profession.

      Enter the client who doesn't want to wait for the best person; the wealthy person can shop around, or might offer a premium to skip a month-long waitlist? Price adjustment happens on both the demand & supply sides?

  10. Sep 2021
    1. ple". The Mexican mineworker had the custom of returning to his village for corn planting and harvest: His lack of initiative, inability to save, absences while celebrating too many holidays, willingness to work only three or four days a week if that paid for necessities, insatiable desire for alchohol - all were pointed out as proof of a natural inferiority. He

      In the next paragraphs, it turns out that there isn't laziness, but misaligned incentives. The lifeways of the people involved were not those of the writer who jumped to conclusions about the people who were different from him.

      In generalizations supported by another study of Mexican labour conditions, Wilbert Moore remarks: "Work is almost always task-orientated in non-industrial societies ... and ... it may be appropriate to tie wages to tasks and not directly to time in newly developing areas".

      When comparing and contrasting cultures, empathy for each and their particular incentives must be taken into account.

      This is particularly important as he's spent a dozen pages talking about how poorly the English dealt with industrialization over centuries themselves. How quickly we forget.

    1. What motivates the characters or the author? What are they seeking? What is their purpose? Here’s how Kurt Vonnegut described the importance of incentives in books: “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
  11. Jun 2021
    1. New Trusted Third Parties Can Be Tempting Many are the reasons why organizations may come to favor costly TTP based security over more efficient and effective security that minimizes the use of TTPs: Limitations of imagination, effort, knowledge, or time amongst protocol designers – it is far easier to design security protocols that rely on TTPs than those that do not (i.e. to fob off the problem rather than solve it). Naturally design costs are an important factor limiting progress towards minimizing TTPs in security protocols. A bigger factor is lack of awareness of the importance of the problem among many security architects, especially the corporate architects who draft Internet and wireless security standards. The temptation to claim the "high ground" as a TTP of choice are great. The ambition to become the next Visa or Verisign is a power trip that's hard to refuse. The barriers to actually building a successful TTP business are, however, often severe – the startup costs are substantial, ongoing costs remain high, liability risks are great, and unless there is a substantial "first mover" advantage barriers to entry for competitors are few. Still, if nobody solves the TTP problems in the protocol this can be a lucrative business, and it's easy to envy big winners like Verisign rather than remembering all the now obscure companies that tried but lost. It's also easy to imagine oneself as the successful TTP, and come to advocate the security protocol that requires the TTP, rather than trying harder to actually solve the security problem. Entrenched interests. Large numbers of articulate professionals make their living using the skills necessary in TTP organizations. For example, the legions of auditors and lawyers who create and operate traditional control structures and legal protections. They naturally favor security models that assume they must step in and implement the real security. In new areas like e-commerce they favor new business models based on TTPs (e.g. Application Service Providers) rather than taking the time to learn new practices that may threaten their old skills. Mental transaction costs. Trust, like taste, is a subjective judgment. Making such judgement requires mental effort. A third party with a good reputation, and that is actually trustworthy, can save its customers from having to do so much research or bear other costs associated with making these judgments. However, entities that claim to be trusted but end up not being trustworthy impose costs not only of a direct nature, when they breach the trust, but increase the general cost of trying to choose between trustworthy and treacherous trusted third parties.

      There are strong incentives to stick with trusted third parties

      1. It's more difficult to design protocols that work without a TTP
      2. It's tempting to imagine oneself as a successful TTP
      3. Entrenched interests — many professions depend on the TTP status quo (e.g. lawyers, auditors)
      4. Mental transaction costs — It can be mentally easier to trust a third party, rather than figuring out who to trust.
  12. Mar 2021
    1. In other words, they are driven by economic and epistemic forces that emanate from the capitalism of today, and that will shape the capitalism of tomorrow – whatever that might look like.
    2. Unlike the latter, however, the neurosciences are extremely well funded by the state and even more so by private investment from the pharmaceutical industry.

      More reasons to be wary. The incentive structure for the research is mostly about control. It's a little sinister. It's not about helping people on their own terms. It's mostly about helping people become "good" citizens and participants of the state apparatus.

  13. Feb 2021
  14. Jan 2021
  15. Sep 2020
    1. However, I quickly realized the problem.  Kotter’s approach puts the senior executive at the center of the story and the leader’s task is to force a change on a resistant organization.  To him, the business leader “defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles” Chaos theory, in contrast, removes the senior executive from the center of the story and puts the system at the center.  That is exciting for people who enjoy thinking about complex systems, but isn’t likely to be profitable to a consulting firm which sells projects to senior executives.

      Looking at a organization through a chaos lens would be more accurate and fruitful, but because it removes the CEO from the center (and replaces it with the system), it's not something a management consultancy would pitch (as they pitch to CEOs).

      This reminds me of pharmaceutical companies not having an incentive to research a drug they cannot patent and thus cannot make a profit on.

  16. Aug 2020
    1. Burn bosses in California can more easily be held liable than their peers in some other states if the wind comes up and their burn goes awry. At the same time, California burn bosses typically suffer no consequences for deciding not to light.
  17. Jun 2020
    1. Media is supported by ads, ads want clicks, clicks come from outrage, so therefore – the media’s goal has shifted to create as much outrage as possible

      our social and media infrastructure are outrage machines, icentivised

    1. I kind of wish there was an HN like job site that was widely used in corporate America but didn’t have all the ‘content’. Just an online resume

      wondering what's the original purpose of adding the news feed to LI, the product decision.

      lack of understanding I think. to drive "engagements" and keep eyeballs? what's the incentives and how do they relate to LI's biz model?

  18. Apr 2019
  19. Dec 2018
  20. Oct 2017
    1. Targeted calls and prizes could provide further motivation36,37, but supporters of research may need to earmark a percentage of all funding for capacity building if they wish to redress structural imbalances in biomedical knowledge generation and use.
    2. the true potential of data sharing. If that potential is to be achieved, the publication of papers in peer reviewed journals must lose their pre-eminence as a measure of scientific productivity in academia. We believe that depositing data in well-curated, quality-assured databases should be rewarded professionally just as publication of papers in high impact journals now is. The use of data in a pooled analysis that demonstrably changes policy should be rewarded at least as well as a citation in a journal.
    3. By adopting the study group model, which appealed to data contributors, WWARN was able simultaneously to build up the database and to begin to conduct important pooled analyses that have contributed directly to improvements in global policy.
    4. People who collect data must be incentivised to share it
  21. Apr 2017
    1.  The actual reward is easy, particularly if you consider it obtusely (and you should): developers are rewarded when actual requirements are satisfied on time in spite of not matching the original requirements.
  22. Oct 2016
    1. In general, humanities scholars have neglected editorial work because the reward structures in the academy have not favored editing but instead literary and cultural theory. Many academics fail to recognize the theoretical sophistication, historical knowledge, and analytical strengths necessary to produce a sound text or texts and the appropriate scholarly apparatus for a first-rate edition.

      Reasons why scholarly editions aren't valued in the academy (c 2008)

  23. Mar 2016
    1. Osuna, C., Crux-Castro, L., & Sanz-Menedez, L. (2011). Overturning some assumptions about the effects ofevaluation systems on publication performance.Scientometrics, 86, 575–592

      evaluation systems and publication performance

    1. The winner-take-all aspect of the priority rule has its drawbacks, however. It can encourage secrecy, sloppy practices, dishonesty and an excessive emphasis on surrogate measures of scientific quality, such as publication in high-impact journals. The editors of the journal Nature have recently exhorted scientists to take greater care in their work, citing poor reproducibility of published findings, errors in figures, improper controls, incomplete descriptions of methods and unsuitable statistical analyses as evidence of increasing sloppiness. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)As competition over reduced funding has increased markedly, these disadvantages of the priority rule may have begun to outweigh its benefits. Success rates for scientists applying for National Institutes of Health funding have recently reached an all-time low. As a result, we have seen a steep rise in unhealthy competition among scientists, accompanied by a dramatic proliferation in the number of scientific publications retracted because of fraud or error. Recent scandals in science are reminiscent of the doping problems in sports, in which disproportionately rich rewards going to winners has fostered cheating.

      How the priority rule is killing science.

    1. Editors, Publishers, Impact Factors, and Reprint Income

      On the incentives for journal editors to publish papers they think might improve IF... and how citations are gamed.

  24. Jun 2015
    1. Users earn points by doing things on the network — uploading, voting, referring, posting, or commenting about content. Users vote on whether they like content or not by swiping, with the most-liked content driven to the top of charts. You can post content to your entire Channel, which is Minds’ term for your fans. To post outside your Channel, you need to use points, like offering 10 of your points to another user for 10 views of your post on their Channel. Points can be also be exchanged with Minds for site-wide sharing.

      The absolute worst incentives. Engagement generates reach? This network is going to amplify the people who already participate the most. This is absolutely upside down. This is rewarding the powerful with more power.

  25. May 2014
    1. Usage-based pricing, where you pay for the capacity that you use, would properly incentivize ISPs to support net neutrality

      YES!!! And if people want to oppose this on the basis that Internet access is an important element of basic literacy then we can invest it in like we once did with libraries and public educational institutions. Subsidize access to reference websites, etc. The libraries of the future could be free, but you must pay for frivolous cat videos. I'm all for this.

  26. Feb 2014
    1. In addition to broad economic trends affecting domestic politics evenly, Fisher also notes the uneven distribution of effects stemming from intellectual property rights (1999, Sect. II. C.). The positive effects of intellectual property rights accrue strongl y to a small number of rights - holders (the paper assumes that there are no significant negative effects to rights - holders); for this reason, rights - holders have significant motive (and potentially greater means) to overcome the significant barriers to acti ve political lobbying.
  27. Jan 2014
    1. If federally funded research is going to broadly benefit society, it has to be widely accessible, not just to curious private citizens, but also to industries, private organizations, and federal, state, and local governments where scientific knowledge can help create new products, solve problems, educate students, and make policy decisions.

      It is The People who will most benefit from open access to federally funded research.

    2. Giving the public what it paid for sounds noble, but from where I sit, a scientist at a well-funded research university, ensuring that research papers are available to the public for free seems pointless.

      This seems to be a comment sentiment-- the open access arguments don't address the individual "what's in it for me?" question. And it is not wrong for people to be asking this question-- not just what benefits them, but also what misery are they in for if they start down this unknown (and possibly treacherous) path? It is the rare few intrepid leaders in this space that can see beyond the immediate benefits and risks-- that can see a new world of science that could exist and are willing to make the epicly dangerous journey along with their loyal argonauts who can withstand the siren song and sail safely through the academic scylla and charybdis.