“…a business that knows its shit and a business that knows it’s shit.”

Earthy goodness on the subject of English punctuation (a sore point with me).

[...] With the pressure off, Siemens is incented to deal with the PR problem and ignore the underlying security problem.

Incented. The meaning is obvious: to provide incentive to do (or avoid doing) something. The concept is old — most of our laws (especially tax law) are designed to “incent” people to do certain things and not do others, by rewarding the desired behaviors and punishing the undesirable ones — but I’d never run across a word dedicated to it before. (Nor, apparently, has my spell checker.)

It’s interesting to me because for Project X, I’m exploring a new kind of programming. The technical details were tricky to work out, but I believe that part is all but done. The next part involves “incenting” the resulting program to do what you want it to, and it has turned out to be much, much more involved that I imagined when I started. Not necessarily difficult, just very complex. Fortunately, I believe I can make something useful with it long before I’ve worked out all of the details.

This has led me to notice a lot of the “incenting” systems in nature too. Some of them are obvious and required, like making sex really desirable to the majority of a species to ensure that the species continues. Others seem to be sometimes-unpleasant side effects of a system that mostly works.

As an example of the latter, I’ve always wondered exactly how schoolyard bullies come about. Previously I had to dismiss it as likely being the result of genetics and upbringing, which doesn’t really explain anything (and certainly doesn’t offer any guidance on discouraging the behavior), but I recently ran across an article that, all unintended, gave me new insight into it.

Children are “incented” by their instincts to do certain things — as babies, for example, they have the urge to put everything in their mouths, probably due to the urge to explore everything and that the tongue is more sensitive than fingers at that age. Adults have to dissuade them from doing some of those things, which results in frustration because they can’t fulfill their urges — Bobby quickly learns that adults will punish him if he hits his sister because she won’t give up a toy that interests him, for instance. But when interacting with other children (especially once they reach school age), if they give into such urges even once, they find that they not only (I hope) get punished, they also get the admiration of their peers who want to do it themselves but don’t dare. Statistically, some such children will find that admiration more compelling than the punishment, and a bully is born.

Do you see the subtle forces involved there? The initial urge to do something socially unacceptable, the urge for parental approval, the desire to avoid the withdrawal of that approval (and possibly the physical pain of a spanking), the social need for the approval of his peers, and likely a dozen other urges that are even more subtle. And that’s a simple example.

I pursue things like that because I find them fascinating, but there are other reasons for it too. If you don’t understand the forces that drive a person or a group, you tend to fear them, the root of hatred and racism; understanding eliminates the fear of the unknown and different, which eliminates the hatred and fosters cooperation for mutual benefit.

In the case of the justice system, there are further reasons. Aside from the obvious one (that better understanding allows for better prevention), the more a judge and jury understand a criminal, even if they don’t sympathize with him, the more likely that if he’s found to be guilty, his sentence will be proportional to the crime. The less they understand him, the more likely his sentence will be punitive and vengeful, because people fear the unknown and uncontrolled fear leads to anger and hatred. Once you understand why someone does something, you can still despise his actions, but you don’t fear or hate him nearly as much as when his motivations were unknown.

I wholeheartedly recommend that people study what drives — or “incents” — others. The more we do, the better we’ll understand them, and the healthier our society will be.

Well, I suppose it kind of does.

Humans can be pretty cruel at times.

(She hangs around FaceBook, so she winces a lot more often than I do, but I get some too… I actually saw someone write, last week, that Apple should “up the aunty” on the minimum memory size of the iPod Touch. And according to Google, he’s not the only one misspelling that phrase. You’d think that Aunty would have something to say about that.)

On the other hand, it’s very amusing to see examples of the worst abuses of our language.

Fortunately, there’s a pretty big bar to entry in the field: you’ve got to spend a lot of time, usually your own time, learning things that bore most people to tears. That tends to weed out all but a small fraction of the population. Which is fine by me… the fewer of us there are, the more demand for our services. As I mentioned to GoddessJ last night, boring stuff can be extremely lucrative if done properly.

(For what it’s worth, I lean toward the “classical conditioning” hypothesis, though the “intrinsic properties” idea could also have merit.)