But trying to make it legible before that point actually RUINS the experience for a lot of people.
Being strictly unable to enjoy things that people pay you to do is obviously not healthy. I think you’re mostly just describing pathologies of the present labor relations that don’t actually entail from tracking credit. We can imagine a world where people are allowed to just work as much as they feel like and where the jobs available are fairly enjoyable, and we must.
In practice, yes, we don’t really know how to track debt in systems of dialog and collaborative filtering systems, but that could change very quickly as the internet becomes more amenable to experiments in that sort of thing. I think there are situations where the overhead of tracking debt will always be too much, peer to peer protocols, maybe, or interactions between bacteria. For anything higher level, I doubt it’s the best we can do.
Being strictly unable to enjoy things that people pay you to do is obviously not healthy.
I think this is a crux (or a communication failure that is important). I didn’t say that payment ruins the experience, I said that the attempt to make it legible in order to calculate payment ruins it. Or at least changes it enough that it’s not the same experience, and I’m likely to look elsewhere for the illegible parts, while gladly accepting payment for the legible (but not as valuable as before) parts.
My main point is that the overhead of debt tracking or payment handling is small, compared to the mental model changes and reconfiguration of expectations when the value is framed in measured units rather than personal, incomparable enjoyable activities.
So, hypothetically speaking, do you think that paying people without measuring them would be harmless? Though I am not sure whether this question even makes sense in real world, because at least you need to make a decision how long you keep paying someone (unless you just committed to paying them forever, regardless of whether they do something or not), which implies some form of measure.
I don’t know how it would be possible to pay without measuring. At the extreme of “unmeasured payments”, I presume a national or global UBI wouldn’t significantly harm any given community or shared space that isn’t related to the UBI criteria. Narrower payment schemes require AT LEAST objective identification of who pays (or is paid), why, and some exclusion mechanism to prevent overpayment. It’s possible this could be minimally-invasive, but improbable.
And, to the extent it’s not distortionary, it’s also not motivating. Payment is (almost always) intended to have an effect on behavior. When it has no effect, there’s not much reason for payment (there may be reason for grants or gifts as rewards, thank-yous, or kindness, but if they’re regular enough they become expected and impactful on future motivation).
Relatedly, the legibility and universality of currency will cause any payment scheme to be considered in terms of scaling. How do we make these measured dimensions bigger (or keep them smaller, in some cases), regardless of impact on all the unmeasured values that people take from the interactions.
When I started this subthread, I didn’t think this was the same as Goodhart, but maybe it is: if people like doing something, and you measure part of it for monetary purposes, you’ve got an imperfect proxy for that value.
Being strictly unable to enjoy things that people pay you to do is obviously not healthy. I think you’re mostly just describing pathologies of the present labor relations that don’t actually entail from tracking credit. We can imagine a world where people are allowed to just work as much as they feel like and where the jobs available are fairly enjoyable, and we must.
In practice, yes, we don’t really know how to track debt in systems of dialog and collaborative filtering systems, but that could change very quickly as the internet becomes more amenable to experiments in that sort of thing.
I think there are situations where the overhead of tracking debt will always be too much, peer to peer protocols, maybe, or interactions between bacteria. For anything higher level, I doubt it’s the best we can do.
I think this is a crux (or a communication failure that is important). I didn’t say that payment ruins the experience, I said that the attempt to make it legible in order to calculate payment ruins it. Or at least changes it enough that it’s not the same experience, and I’m likely to look elsewhere for the illegible parts, while gladly accepting payment for the legible (but not as valuable as before) parts.
My main point is that the overhead of debt tracking or payment handling is small, compared to the mental model changes and reconfiguration of expectations when the value is framed in measured units rather than personal, incomparable enjoyable activities.
So, hypothetically speaking, do you think that paying people without measuring them would be harmless? Though I am not sure whether this question even makes sense in real world, because at least you need to make a decision how long you keep paying someone (unless you just committed to paying them forever, regardless of whether they do something or not), which implies some form of measure.
I don’t know how it would be possible to pay without measuring. At the extreme of “unmeasured payments”, I presume a national or global UBI wouldn’t significantly harm any given community or shared space that isn’t related to the UBI criteria. Narrower payment schemes require AT LEAST objective identification of who pays (or is paid), why, and some exclusion mechanism to prevent overpayment. It’s possible this could be minimally-invasive, but improbable.
And, to the extent it’s not distortionary, it’s also not motivating. Payment is (almost always) intended to have an effect on behavior. When it has no effect, there’s not much reason for payment (there may be reason for grants or gifts as rewards, thank-yous, or kindness, but if they’re regular enough they become expected and impactful on future motivation).
Relatedly, the legibility and universality of currency will cause any payment scheme to be considered in terms of scaling. How do we make these measured dimensions bigger (or keep them smaller, in some cases), regardless of impact on all the unmeasured values that people take from the interactions.
When I started this subthread, I didn’t think this was the same as Goodhart, but maybe it is: if people like doing something, and you measure part of it for monetary purposes, you’ve got an imperfect proxy for that value.