Scientific Definition
Scaling rewards push systems past the point where they can hold human nuance.
Plain-English Definition
Scaling rewards push systems past the point where they can hold human nuance.
Feynman Explanation
Past a certain size, everything becomes its average user.
Core Principle
Scaling rewards push systems past the point where they can hold human nuance.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Scaling rewards push systems past the point where they can hold human nuance.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Scale economics is also scale erosion of judgment.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Past a certain size, everything becomes its average user.
Examples
- Mass platforms losing context-sensitivity at scale.
- Scale economics is also scale erosion of judgment.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Sub-scale units. Human-in-loop thresholds.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Sub-scale units. Human-in-loop thresholds.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
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Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Once-a-year feedback rewards once-a-year behavior.
The more a quantitative indicator drives decisions, the more it distorts the process it measures.
Donors penalize 'overhead'; charities under-invest in capacity.
Donors penalize 'overhead' and starve capacity that produces outcomes.
A reward designed to reduce X produces more X.
Squeezing all slack from a system optimizes throughput but eliminates resilience.
'Equal value' exchanges incentivize subjective appraisal gaming to trade low-utility land for high-value public assets.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Deep specialization improves local output but breaks cross-domain understanding.
Greedy improvement loops climb hills that aren't the highest hill.
When rewards don't match stated values, culture quietly decays toward what is rewarded.
Insulation from risk changes the risks people take.