5 ms·

I think it's human nature to do a little as possible for the most reward. If someone is giving you money to literally do nothing, then you're likely going to do

I think it's human nature to do a little as possible for the most reward. If someone is giving you money to literally do nothing, then you're likely going to do..nothing!

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
That's provably false.
- mises 8y ago
  Can you add any sources for this? I see several that support OP's position from a cursory search. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort https://medium.com/the-mission/dont-use-rewards-for-motivation-e88c933e26a3 https://medium.com/the-mission/dont-use-rewards-for-motivati... http://hepg.org/hel-home/issues/10_2/helarticle/the-case-against-rewards-and-praise http://hepg.org/hel-home/issues/10_2/helarticle/the-case-aga...
  - devilshaircut 8y ago
    In your own citation: "Rewards kill creativity. Some twenty studies have shown that people do inferior work when they are expecting to get a reward for doing it, as compared with people doing the same task without any expectation of a reward. That effect is most pronounced when creativity is involved in the task." Would this not suggest that people do their best work when they aren't doing it for the paycheck? In other words, given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output.
    - 2019ideas 8y ago
      >given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output. But having fun making art means little to an economy. Having less fun designing a robot to pick potatoes will transform an economy. Creativity is nice, but it doesn't directly correlate with additional value.
      - devilshaircut 8y ago
        I wasn't really referring to economic value, nor was the quote or the cited article itself. The proposition was that people will do the least work for the most reward where possible. The cited article suggested that rewards result in poor quality work.
      - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
        I guess I'm kind of confused- additional value to what exactly? The GDP in America is massive but I don't know what are the returns of a growing GDP to my experience as a human, to my family, to my friends, to my quality of life. Will I pass by less homeless people on the way to work if I work harder? Will there be less hungry children in my schools if I make the economy grow, and by how much? What "additional value" is actually occuring? (EDIT: This is a genuine question; I'm not highly educated on economics and I'd like to know the approximate models that currently exist on how much growing the economy helps numbers like homeless population, healthcare coverage, lifespan, birth survival, food security...)
    - mises 8y ago
      Artists represent 1.4% of the workforce in America. Lots of people (the ones who need support) don't do jobs requiring creativity.
Arubis 8y ago
Within the framework of rewarding people for behaving the way you're compelling them to, that's probably roughly true. But I'm doubtful that people are actually sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, doing _nothing_. Maybe they're not getting jobs per se, but I'm very curious about what they actually are doing with the time they'd otherwise have to sell.
- Simulacra 8y ago
  If you gave me money with no requirement that I perform a task, or adhere to a set of rules, just free money in my lap, I'm going to use it to increase my level of joy and comfort, and avoidance of work. Granted I may take that money and spend it all on hookers and blow, but I will be doing what I want with that money, and not having to return any service or labor for it.
  - mrybczyn 8y ago
    where will the hookers and blow come from if the hookers and dealers are on basic and doing nothing?
    - verall 8y ago
      price rises until people start working as hookers and dealers to afford other hookers and blow ;)
- dageshi 8y ago
  Playing videogames?
- Arubis 8y ago
  I should add, given sibling comments here--I wish they'd actually asked about this as a part of the study. What we're _supposing_ people would do with all that extra time feels like a values-based conversation, which won't get any of us anywhere. (I, for one, would kick back and do not a whole lot for 4-6 weeks, get bored, and start building something--but that's one datum.) Rather than us positing and projecting values, I'd love to see some data around this (though obviously I would love it somewhat less if it proved my optimistic viewpoint wrong).
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
They didn't crawl under a rock. They socialized with their families, maybe played on a team, contributed to the Animal Shelter, who knows what-all. Its called a life, and work is not the goal of it.
- 2019ideas 8y ago
  > Its called a life, and work is not the goal of it. This type of thinking needs to stop. You don't get to enjoy our lavish society without contributing. If you want food and a shack, you can already live this lifestyle for less than 5k/yr. Hanging out with your family, playing sports, and helping animals will not keep an economy moving.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    That type of thinking has got to go. An ever-growing number of folks in 'our' society (presuming Western technological) are making only symbolic contributions. Automation is rapidly overtaking jobs. Understand what that means. It doesn't just mean unemployment/underemployment. It means nobody has to work to create what automation took over. An ever-increasing fraction of the 'lavish society' has no human cost burden at all. So that knee-jerk thinking above is growing ever-more irrelevant and obsolete. That's pretty much the whole conversation here.
happytoexplain 8y ago
I always have a really hard time relating to where this incredibly negative sentiment about people comes from. It seems like people look at times when other people are "lazy" and extrapolate it to all of humanity, but I think the perception of "lazy" in this context is just what it looks like when a person hates the work they're forced to do and/or is suffering and unhappy due to financial trouble. I feel like most people who seem to lay around doing nothing are doing so in the small time they have where they are not being psychologically and physically exhausted by their job, so it doesn't make sense to assume that's what they want to do. It reminds me of the scene in Battlefield Earth where the aliens with a superiority complex release starving humans into an abandoned building and they eat the first thing they see - a rat. Aha, man's favorite food must be rats!
- antisthenes 8y ago
  > I always have a really hard time relating to where this incredibly negative sentiment about people comes from. It comes from your head. The statement itself is neutral, and for whatever reason, you're giving it a negative connotation. Most organisms on this planet evolved so as to expend less energy without necessity, humans as no exception. That is not negative or positive - that's a normative judgment you give that statement.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I'm far from the group that thinks everyone not working is "lazy", but I can understand the situation: If you find someone that is legit being lazy (best examples are clear fraud with no mitigating reasoning) you feel outraged and "stolen from". And it does happen - I worked for Virginia state social services when a hurricane came through, and the department set up centers where you could get fast approval for food stamps - you had to fill out a few (3, i think?) lines about income, and your actual eligibility would figured out later - if you weren't eligible, you'd owe the money back, but the idea was to help people that had lost their food, their jobs, etc immediately. Months later the word came back about fraud. And it was a doozy. The program was a general success, but there were SO MANY fraud cases. And I don't mean "missed a number" or "didn't understand that this asset mattered" or even "struggling but not legally struggling enough" - I mean blatant, totally unnecessary, how-are-you-not-ashamed fraud. As a liberal I found it shocking. It's easy to allow this outrage to count for more than the actual money is worth, to ignore the many, many legit needy cases where people WEREN'T being like this. I read once that the true difference between a liberal and conservative is not about compassion - both can be fully compassionate - but whether they are more outraged by someone in need being neglected or by someone not in need taking advantage of the offer of help. I also think that most people don't actually see either side of this coin - they don't see the people in need getting help, nor those that abuse it. They hear about it and their emotions take hold (in either direction). And most of them, regardless of reaction, aren't hearing the actual truth.
scarecrowbob 8y ago
Is staying home and taking care of my kids doing nothing?
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
except in reality people max themselves out and would continue to do so without the requirement to work - it's human nature to work as hard as possible for what one loves
msluyter 8y ago
Incentives matter, as they say, so I'm sure you're correct to some degree, but by how much? Don't forget about the importance of relative status. At least some -- my guess would be a large majority, but part of the problem with these discussions is that everyone's just doing WAGs without much real data -- folks will want a) better than average educations for their children, b) nicer houses in safer than average neighborhoods, c) etc... and will work quite hard for it. And since these are positional goods, UBI will have no impact on their availability. Personally, I tend to think that UBI is untenable for mostly other reasons (extraction by rentiers, for example).
2019ideas 8y ago
I can't disagree with this. Unless I am inspired, I will not work for free. I imagine the opposite would be true for myself, and I consider myself a hard worker.
Henk0 8y ago
Nope. Human nature is to do what is possible within the confines of actual and perceived external and internal limitations to increase our partner value in order to procreate and propagate our genes. The increase in partner value as a motivation is often not conscious, and is evaluated via our emotional system based on proxy variables like social status among our peers, and appreciation and attention from others. There are different ways to increase status and attention, and in optimal conditions, people tend to learn early on what they are naturally better at, for example sports (signals physical health), music, art, poetry (signals intelligence), administrative work (signals intelligence and reliability) etc. People are naturally inclined to be productive, not for money, but to be valued and appreciated in their social context for the reaons above. Our society is not a natural or optimal (in evolutionary terms) environment for humans, and many of the incentives that drive our behaviors in it are set up with the goal of maximizing economic productivity of the system (or a subset of it with more political and ideological influence), but have a negative impact on the wellbeing and functioning of the people in it. When someone becomes trapped in a situation where they are unhappy – unemployment, or a terrible job that they can’t realistically leave – he or she is likely to sink into depression and a state of learned helplessness. When you’ve learned that nothing you do has any effect on your situation, you give up, do what you have to do to survive and no more, and self-medicate through food, alcohol, drugs, media consumption or whatever else gives you some relief from feelings of hopelessness, shame and guilt. From outside, this may look like: Laziness

I think it's human nature to do a little as possible for the most reward. If someone is giving you money to literally do nothing, then you're likely going to do..nothing!

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

That's provably false.

mises 8y ago
Can you add any sources for this? I see several that support OP's position from a cursory search. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort https://medium.com/the-mission/dont-use-rewards-for-motivation-e88c933e26a3 https://medium.com/the-mission/dont-use-rewards-for-motivati... http://hepg.org/hel-home/issues/10_2/helarticle/the-case-against-rewards-and-praise http://hepg.org/hel-home/issues/10_2/helarticle/the-case-aga...
- devilshaircut 8y ago
  In your own citation: "Rewards kill creativity. Some twenty studies have shown that people do inferior work when they are expecting to get a reward for doing it, as compared with people doing the same task without any expectation of a reward. That effect is most pronounced when creativity is involved in the task." Would this not suggest that people do their best work when they aren't doing it for the paycheck? In other words, given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output.
  - 2019ideas 8y ago
    >given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output. But having fun making art means little to an economy. Having less fun designing a robot to pick potatoes will transform an economy. Creativity is nice, but it doesn't directly correlate with additional value.
    - devilshaircut 8y ago
      I wasn't really referring to economic value, nor was the quote or the cited article itself. The proposition was that people will do the least work for the most reward where possible. The cited article suggested that rewards result in poor quality work.
    - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      I guess I'm kind of confused- additional value to what exactly? The GDP in America is massive but I don't know what are the returns of a growing GDP to my experience as a human, to my family, to my friends, to my quality of life. Will I pass by less homeless people on the way to work if I work harder? Will there be less hungry children in my schools if I make the economy grow, and by how much? What "additional value" is actually occuring? (EDIT: This is a genuine question; I'm not highly educated on economics and I'd like to know the approximate models that currently exist on how much growing the economy helps numbers like homeless population, healthcare coverage, lifespan, birth survival, food security...)
  - mises 8y ago
    Artists represent 1.4% of the workforce in America. Lots of people (the ones who need support) don't do jobs requiring creativity.

Arubis 8y ago

Within the framework of rewarding people for behaving the way you're compelling them to, that's probably roughly true. But I'm doubtful that people are actually sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, doing _nothing_. Maybe they're not getting jobs per se, but I'm very curious about what they actually are doing with the time they'd otherwise have to sell.

Simulacra 8y ago
If you gave me money with no requirement that I perform a task, or adhere to a set of rules, just free money in my lap, I'm going to use it to increase my level of joy and comfort, and avoidance of work. Granted I may take that money and spend it all on hookers and blow, but I will be doing what I want with that money, and not having to return any service or labor for it.
- mrybczyn 8y ago
  where will the hookers and blow come from if the hookers and dealers are on basic and doing nothing?
  - verall 8y ago
    price rises until people start working as hookers and dealers to afford other hookers and blow ;)
dageshi 8y ago
Playing videogames?
Arubis 8y ago
I should add, given sibling comments here--I wish they'd actually asked about this as a part of the study. What we're _supposing_ people would do with all that extra time feels like a values-based conversation, which won't get any of us anywhere. (I, for one, would kick back and do not a whole lot for 4-6 weeks, get bored, and start building something--but that's one datum.) Rather than us positing and projecting values, I'd love to see some data around this (though obviously I would love it somewhat less if it proved my optimistic viewpoint wrong).

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

They didn't crawl under a rock. They socialized with their families, maybe played on a team, contributed to the Animal Shelter, who knows what-all. Its called a life, and work is not the goal of it.

2019ideas 8y ago
> Its called a life, and work is not the goal of it. This type of thinking needs to stop. You don't get to enjoy our lavish society without contributing. If you want food and a shack, you can already live this lifestyle for less than 5k/yr. Hanging out with your family, playing sports, and helping animals will not keep an economy moving.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  That type of thinking has got to go. An ever-growing number of folks in 'our' society (presuming Western technological) are making only symbolic contributions. Automation is rapidly overtaking jobs. Understand what that means. It doesn't just mean unemployment/underemployment. It means nobody has to work to create what automation took over. An ever-increasing fraction of the 'lavish society' has no human cost burden at all. So that knee-jerk thinking above is growing ever-more irrelevant and obsolete. That's pretty much the whole conversation here.

happytoexplain 8y ago

I always have a really hard time relating to where this incredibly negative sentiment about people comes from. It seems like people look at times when other people are "lazy" and extrapolate it to all of humanity, but I think the perception of "lazy" in this context is just what it looks like when a person hates the work they're forced to do and/or is suffering and unhappy due to financial trouble. I feel like most people who seem to lay around doing nothing are doing so in the small time they have where they are not being psychologically and physically exhausted by their job, so it doesn't make sense to assume that's what they want to do. It reminds me of the scene in Battlefield Earth where the aliens with a superiority complex release starving humans into an abandoned building and they eat the first thing they see - a rat. Aha, man's favorite food must be rats!

antisthenes 8y ago
> I always have a really hard time relating to where this incredibly negative sentiment about people comes from. It comes from your head. The statement itself is neutral, and for whatever reason, you're giving it a negative connotation. Most organisms on this planet evolved so as to expend less energy without necessity, humans as no exception. That is not negative or positive - that's a normative judgment you give that statement.
ergothus 8y ago
I'm far from the group that thinks everyone not working is "lazy", but I can understand the situation: If you find someone that is legit being lazy (best examples are clear fraud with no mitigating reasoning) you feel outraged and "stolen from". And it does happen - I worked for Virginia state social services when a hurricane came through, and the department set up centers where you could get fast approval for food stamps - you had to fill out a few (3, i think?) lines about income, and your actual eligibility would figured out later - if you weren't eligible, you'd owe the money back, but the idea was to help people that had lost their food, their jobs, etc immediately. Months later the word came back about fraud. And it was a doozy. The program was a general success, but there were SO MANY fraud cases. And I don't mean "missed a number" or "didn't understand that this asset mattered" or even "struggling but not legally struggling enough" - I mean blatant, totally unnecessary, how-are-you-not-ashamed fraud. As a liberal I found it shocking. It's easy to allow this outrage to count for more than the actual money is worth, to ignore the many, many legit needy cases where people WEREN'T being like this. I read once that the true difference between a liberal and conservative is not about compassion - both can be fully compassionate - but whether they are more outraged by someone in need being neglected or by someone not in need taking advantage of the offer of help. I also think that most people don't actually see either side of this coin - they don't see the people in need getting help, nor those that abuse it. They hear about it and their emotions take hold (in either direction). And most of them, regardless of reaction, aren't hearing the actual truth.

scarecrowbob 8y ago

Is staying home and taking care of my kids doing nothing?

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

except in reality people max themselves out and would continue to do so without the requirement to work - it's human nature to work as hard as possible for what one loves

msluyter 8y ago

Incentives matter, as they say, so I'm sure you're correct to some degree, but by how much? Don't forget about the importance of relative status. At least some -- my guess would be a large majority, but part of the problem with these discussions is that everyone's just doing WAGs without much real data -- folks will want a) better than average educations for their children, b) nicer houses in safer than average neighborhoods, c) etc... and will work quite hard for it. And since these are positional goods, UBI will have no impact on their availability. Personally, I tend to think that UBI is untenable for mostly other reasons (extraction by rentiers, for example).

2019ideas 8y ago

I can't disagree with this. Unless I am inspired, I will not work for free. I imagine the opposite would be true for myself, and I consider myself a hard worker.

Henk0 8y ago

Nope. Human nature is to do what is possible within the confines of actual and perceived external and internal limitations to increase our partner value in order to procreate and propagate our genes. The increase in partner value as a motivation is often not conscious, and is evaluated via our emotional system based on proxy variables like social status among our peers, and appreciation and attention from others. There are different ways to increase status and attention, and in optimal conditions, people tend to learn early on what they are naturally better at, for example sports (signals physical health), music, art, poetry (signals intelligence), administrative work (signals intelligence and reliability) etc. People are naturally inclined to be productive, not for money, but to be valued and appreciated in their social context for the reaons above. Our society is not a natural or optimal (in evolutionary terms) environment for humans, and many of the incentives that drive our behaviors in it are set up with the goal of maximizing economic productivity of the system (or a subset of it with more political and ideological influence), but have a negative impact on the wellbeing and functioning of the people in it. When someone becomes trapped in a situation where they are unhappy – unemployment, or a terrible job that they can’t realistically leave – he or she is likely to sink into depression and a state of learned helplessness. When you’ve learned that nothing you do has any effect on your situation, you give up, do what you have to do to survive and no more, and self-medicate through food, alcohol, drugs, media consumption or whatever else gives you some relief from feelings of hopelessness, shame and guilt. From outside, this may look like: Laziness