The fantastic phenomenon of incentives
Reward one direction and everything drifts toward it, including the things you never meant to reward.
Imagine a dot. It travels left or right at a random speed. Press Run to start it.
Once upon a time, you did things. You tried everything, no matter where it led.
When the dot reaches an edge, a new dot starts in the middle and picks a new direction.
To get better, you tried, and tried, and tried again.
Now, when a dot reaches an edge, it doubles. Two dots start in the middle and go the same way as their parent. The frame fills up fast. When it is full, each new dot takes the place of a random old one.
Growth does not choose a direction. It multiplies the direction you already have.
Run it a few times. The dots always go the way the first dot went.
Now add an incentive /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/ in-SEN-tiv A reward or a penalty that moves a person to act. When the incentive changes, the behaviour changes. Read the article →. Only the right edge gives a dot two children. A dot that reaches the left edge gets nothing, and it is gone. One child in ten turns around by accident.
Some of what you do goes nowhere. It breaks. It offends someone. It is the wrong colour. That is OK, because some of it goes the right way, and that part multiplies.
The dots do not know where the reward is. Nobody steers them. Each child goes the way its parent went, and the dots that go left have no children. Run it ten times and the dots end up on the right almost every time. The incentive acts like a magnet.
One more change. Each child gets a tiny random change in speed, up or down.
Watch the speed. It climbs.
Nobody rewarded speed. The reward goes to the dots that reach the right edge, and fast dots reach it more often. So they have more children, and the crowd gets faster. An incentive pays for everything that helps a dot get the reward, whether you meant to pay for it or not.
What is going on
Three things work together here.
- Exponential growth. Each success makes two more attempts. Small numbers get big fast. Fold a piece of paper 42 times and it reaches the moon.
- Random mutation. Each copy is a little different. Most changes do nothing. A few work better, and the incentive multiplies those.
- Selection. The incentive decides which attempts get copied. Over time, it decides what the whole crowd looks like.
The same math works in reverse. If each attempt makes less than one new attempt, the crowd shrinks to nothing.
Where to go from here
Do something. The dots win only because they keep moving. When an attempt fails, learn from it and try again. Too many of us scroll our lives away and forget the power we had when we used to do things.
Choose your incentives carefully. An incentive gets you more of whatever it rewards, and that includes the side effects. Before you set one up, ask what else it pays for.