Episode Details

A few years ago I listened to a fascinating podcast interview featuring former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. They agreed that politics is a mess and politicians are constantly doing bad things that harm the people they are supposed to serve. But they couldn’t agree on how bad that made the politicians as people.

Yang wanted to view the politicians as normal people responding to bad incentives, but Williamson wanted to call them evil for failing to exercise courage in the face of these bad incentives.

Morally, the notion that you can’t blame people when they are following incentives is akin to the “just following orders” excuse that Nazis tried to use at the Nuremberg trials. But what's the alternative? In practice, we can’t and don’t expect people to always do the right thing even when everyone else around them isn’t.

There's a point at which “everyone else is doing it” really is an acceptable excuse, because everyone else really is doing it, and not doing so puts you at a significant and unfair disadvantage. But there are also absolutes, where this excuse is never acceptable -- things like genocide.

Most of the time [...]

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Outline:

(01:46) Are the incentives in the room with us right now?

(03:27) One-shot thinking is commonly misapplied

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First published:
April 3rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ty9kHKhW7ivtimuWr/following-the-incentives

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.