Jason, you and I have discussed the importance of the system vs. those operating it before. The ideas expressed in your essay are solid, but both matter. Systems need to be better, but people must be willing to work with them and not game them.
I especially like the example of how there used to be twelve separate budgets. Much better idea!
appreciate you coming back to engage with this, and you're raising the point I hear most often - so let me clarify what I mean.
You're absolutely right that people can choose to game systems or work within them honorably. Individual character matters. But here's the key distinction:
A well-designed system makes the honorable choice the rational choice. A badly designed system forces good people to either compromise their values or fail.
Think about the twelve-budget example you mentioned. When each committee controlled its own budget independently, the rational behavior for any individual member was to protect their committee's funding. Not because they were bad people - because that's what the system incentivized. They'd get blamed by constituents if they didn't fight for "their" programs.
The system created the conflict. It made cooperation structurally difficult even for people who wanted to cooperate.
I'm not saying "people don't matter." I'm saying: we can't keep relying on a constant supply of saints to make a broken system work. We need a system that works even when operated by normal, flawed humans acting in their rational self-interest.
That's the difference between hoping for better behavior and engineering better incentives.
I'm happy to hear from you again! I enjoy our discussions!
"The system wasn’t handed down from Mount Sinai."
And even if it had been ...
Exactly. And even Moses came down with version 2.0 after the first tablets didn’t work out.
Jason, you and I have discussed the importance of the system vs. those operating it before. The ideas expressed in your essay are solid, but both matter. Systems need to be better, but people must be willing to work with them and not game them.
I especially like the example of how there used to be twelve separate budgets. Much better idea!
appreciate you coming back to engage with this, and you're raising the point I hear most often - so let me clarify what I mean.
You're absolutely right that people can choose to game systems or work within them honorably. Individual character matters. But here's the key distinction:
A well-designed system makes the honorable choice the rational choice. A badly designed system forces good people to either compromise their values or fail.
Think about the twelve-budget example you mentioned. When each committee controlled its own budget independently, the rational behavior for any individual member was to protect their committee's funding. Not because they were bad people - because that's what the system incentivized. They'd get blamed by constituents if they didn't fight for "their" programs.
The system created the conflict. It made cooperation structurally difficult even for people who wanted to cooperate.
I'm not saying "people don't matter." I'm saying: we can't keep relying on a constant supply of saints to make a broken system work. We need a system that works even when operated by normal, flawed humans acting in their rational self-interest.
That's the difference between hoping for better behavior and engineering better incentives.
I'm happy to hear from you again! I enjoy our discussions!