Incentive Bias « Fortune Unmasked

Paul Graham

It’s a Paul Graham post. Smart guy, smart ideas…

Paul Graham giving a talk at Startup School.

Paul Graham on What You’ll Wish You’d Known

[Bonus: The link for the Startup School site with loads of great video's other smart and eloquent thinkers]

The Start-up Guru

“Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.”—Paul Graham

Disconnecting Distraction

There is a nice loop of paradox here that I am reading this, posting this and you will also be reading this on the Internet…

After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn’t realize that it evolves. Something that used to be safe, using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some days I’d wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn’t gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often.

It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the problem was intermittent. I ignored it the way you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. When I was in the middle of a project, distractions weren’t really a problem. It was when I’d finished one project and was deciding what to do next that they always bit me.

Another reason it was hard to notice the danger of this new type of distraction was that social customs hadn’t yet caught up with it. If I’d spent a whole morning sitting on a sofa watching TV, I’d have noticed very quickly. That’s a known danger sign, like drinking alone. But using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.

Eventually, though, it became clear that the Internet had become so much more distracting that I had to start treating it differently. Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox.

[Read more | Disconnecting Distraction]

The New Yorker has about as good an example you will find, certainly on the grandest scale, of how important defining and aligning incentives within social structures really is. The total bill for medical care in the USA makes their military spending and economic bailouts look like after thoughts, consuming more than one in every six dollars America earns!

In the discussion I had over this my friend took the view that “medicine is just a business” like any other. I disagree, sure people should be rewarded for their training and skill but that doesn’t mean those rewards should be unlimited or that some other factors shouldn’t be bought in to balance things towards “appropriate” care as opposed to pure profiteering?

What is “appropriate”? How many tests, medications or procedures, if any, for a given case is correct? What might these “balancing factors” be?

This is the Gordian knot, I don’t know what’s appropriate care, that’s what we pay doctors to decide, lawyers aren’t going to be able to figure that out either… are you starting to see the problem here?

[The New Yorker | Read more]