The city installed speed bumps near my house

And now I’m thinking about ancient Chinese war generals

Intro

So I’ve been thinking about incentive structures, and how so much of our world is governed by simple cost benefit calculations, and the dramatic impact the smallest changes can have.

In my own life, the city installed a whole bunch of speed bumps along the street I live on, meaning that it now takes about three times as long for me to get my morning coffee from the local shop — which triggered a series of behaviour changes:

1. Without my morning coffee (as well as the accompanying drive in which I would mentally prepare myself for all of the work for the day) I wouldn’t be able to go to the coffee shop nearly as often. Therefore,

2. I would have much less to look forward to upon waking up. Therefore,

3. I found myself going to bed later and later. And,

4. After a couple weeks of this my circadian became so bad I was basically jetlagged in my own time zone — to the point that I actually needed to take prescription medication for a couple days to allow the whole thing to reset.

So yeah, speed bumps suck — they got me hooked on drugs. Thanks, Obama.

Anyways, the whole thing caught me pondering the incentive structures of other people throughout history. I’ve written about the subject before; it was the very first post I made on Substack.

But before I dive into it, I caught some flack in my previous post about not citing definitions; here is John Maynard Keynes’s exact definition of incentive structures:

When people be like “yeah dog that’s dope” they do more of it — and when they be like “naw homey that’s whack” they just vibe.

Peter Higgs

Higgs is the physicist who created the Higgs boson i.e. god particle. He literally went to a lab, said “It’s Higgs’in time,” and created gauge bosons with his bare hands. Crazy, right?

But here’s the crazier thing. He mentioned in an article that he wouldn’t have been able to make this discovery in the modern environment of academia, where one must publish or perish. He needed to go away for a number of years and work on this one thing, producing no results in the interim.

It just makes you think, there’s probably another Peter Higgs out there, who has a universe shattering revelation in his head — only to be stifled by side projects, because she won’t get grant money otherwise.

Chen Sheng and Wu Guang

So basically these two army officers lead a small force of soldiers around 200 BC. They were supposed to show up to a battlefield, but because of strong rains and floods they realized they wouldn’t be able to get there at the allotted hour.

Unfortunately, their boss — the guy running the Chinese empire at the time — was this guy:

The punishment for showing up to a battle late? Death.

The punishment for full scale rebellion against their master? Also death.

Guess what Chen Sheng and Wu Guang decided to do.

Yep, strong rains ended up destroying the Qin dynasty, killing tens of thousands in the process. Bummer.

And speaking of bummers…

The other Adolf

Adolf Eichmann, while just as evil as Chaplin moustache himself, represents a sort of villainy that feels more personable. Unlike the other prime members of the SS, Eichmann was largely… Boring. Unremarkable. Mundane.

That is to say, the trajectory of his life is something you might find on any business podcast: started off as a typical bureaucrat, worked his way up through the hierarchy, and eventually achieved a very high ranking position. He came from relatively humble circumstances, and showed no great talents early on.

Through sheer hard work and playing by the rules, he got it done. The problem is, he was playing by the rules of Nazi Germany, and when I say he got it done, I mean he architected the Final Solution.

It’s uniquely scary in the sense that, had he been born in an alternate time and place, he might’ve easily been some common transport minister, working on the hyperloop or something.

Don’t get me wrong, when they played the audio recordings at Jerusalem, it was clear that he was just as fanatic in the evil cause as the rest of them — but his part to play was incredibly quotidian. In that sense, he represents a more relatable form of evil; take anybody in modern times and twist the incentives in the right way, and they might find themselves the next Eichmann.

Cash the fyre festival outside, how about that?

On a slightly lighter note — although, equally depressing the more I think about it — the incentive structure of today’s online world has turned everything into “content.”

It doesn’t matter if things are bad or good, or outright garbage — as long as it brings attention, it’s an opportunity. That’s why the “cash me outside” girl has over $20 million net worth, and why Billy McFarland — a literal criminal charged for fraud because of the fyre festival debacle — has already sold out tickets for fyre festival two.

In other words, being a good person means nothing if there’s no hype train behind it.

Conclusion

Honestly I don’t have a greater lesson to draw from all these stories, other than… Speed bumps suck, I guess? I don’t know, once I get the hang of this whole sleeping thing again, I’ll figure it out.