Matt D Posted December 22, 2014 Posted December 22, 2014 This post is in response to Stefan's 'Fuck Evil' elevator pitch for being good as well as podcast 2839 Death by Incentives: What Makes The World Go Round. For the people on this board, "Fuck Evil" is what makes us get out of bed in the morning. Yet, the rest of humanity is content to say "I don't really want to fight evil". Just like Freedomain Radio has done over the course of its near decade-long history, we have to get better at incentivizing good in the world; we have to figure out what will make others want to be good if we want to win them over the the side of true ethics. What I've been wondering for the past month is two-fold: 1) What examples are there currently in the world where being good is profitable? and 2) What are the barriers to making true ethics profitable (be they currencies of economic, social or physiological nature), besides the obvious gun of the government? I have my own thoughts but I want to hear from people on the board. More specifically, I'm wondering why we have credit scores but no one has invented a 'virtue score'. What if everyone involved in a community was given a score which could go up or down depending on the objective measure of virtue in their actions? We have the scientific framework to assess people on a moral level -- universally preferable behavior -- so what is stopping us from taking the assessment outside of theory and putting it into concrete measurements? As we know from physics and engineering, if you can't measure something it doesn't exist. For me this is inevitable in the course of achieving freedom, and we do it in our personal relationships without even thinking about it. Perhaps the expansion of incentives into the public domain has not happened yet because the world is not ready for it. But we have proved that at least a small portion of the world is ready for it. I've experienced FDR as very similar to a DRO. I'm much more likely to want to buy goods from people in this community than from everyone outside of the community. Any entrepreneurs out there looking for a really difficult but rewarding project?
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