Source: Facebook

—“Curt do you believe in any conspiracy theories?”— Aaron Kahland

I fall on the other side of the spectrum in that I am not sure we are all that much in control of how we follow incentives; and that in general, people feel intuitions to follow certain forms of incentives and they tend to do so whenever the opportunity is left open.

So we must always suppress all possible incentives that would provide opportunity rather than imagine people are able to resist opportunities and justify them by one means or another.

So for example, I understand what the advertising, marketing, financial, and political sectors along with women, christians, jews, muslims are all doing. And the European project is my favorite example of a really bad set of incentives. But whether it’s a conspiracy, genetics, or cultural ‘training’ to produce their behaviors is something else.

I have been wrong about conspiracies that have proven to be true a number of times, precisely because I have so much experience ‘diagnosing’ organizations (business, industries, economies, and institutions) where some set of incentives produce other malincentives that produce unintended consequences.

But I tend to try to remain in control of my life, and my advantages of birth give me some control over it, so I am probably the subject of malignancies of underestimating ill intentions. Which is what the data says we should expect. My problem is more the obsessive autistic machine in my own head. It colors my judgement more than anything else.