purely because they thought it’d be fun to win a bet and make some money off a friend.
I do think the “purely” matters a good bit here. While I would go as far as to argue that even purely financial motivations are fine (and should be leveraged for the public good when possible), I think in as much as I understand your perspective, it becomes a lot less bad if people are only partially motivated by making money (or gaining status within their community).
As a concrete example, I think large fractions of academia are motivated by wanting a sense of legacy and prestige (this includes large fractions of epidemiology, which is highly relevant to this situation). Those motivations also feel not fully great to me, and I would feel worried about an academic system that tries to purely operate on those motivations. However, I would similarly expect an academic system that does not recognize those motivations at all, bans all expressions of those sentiments, and does not build system that leverages them, to also fail quite disastrously.
I think in order to produce large-scale coordination, it is important to enable the leveraging a of a large variety of motivations, while also keeping them in check by ensuring at least a minimum level of more aligned motivations (or some other external systems that ensures partially aligned motivations still result in good outcomes).
I do think the “purely” matters a good bit here. While I would go as far as to argue that even purely financial motivations are fine (and should be leveraged for the public good when possible), I think in as much as I understand your perspective, it becomes a lot less bad if people are only partially motivated by making money (or gaining status within their community).
As a concrete example, I think large fractions of academia are motivated by wanting a sense of legacy and prestige (this includes large fractions of epidemiology, which is highly relevant to this situation). Those motivations also feel not fully great to me, and I would feel worried about an academic system that tries to purely operate on those motivations. However, I would similarly expect an academic system that does not recognize those motivations at all, bans all expressions of those sentiments, and does not build system that leverages them, to also fail quite disastrously.
I think in order to produce large-scale coordination, it is important to enable the leveraging a of a large variety of motivations, while also keeping them in check by ensuring at least a minimum level of more aligned motivations (or some other external systems that ensures partially aligned motivations still result in good outcomes).