# Motivation is not context-free Some (I believe) uncontroversial points: 1. Incentives change behavior. 2. People who are motivated by achievement and status will find those motivations molded by the context they’re in. If the culture you’re in bestows status on those who driving their enemies before them, you will feel motivated to drive your enemies before you. If the culture you’re in bestows status on rockstars, you will feel especially strong motivation to pick up the guitar. Some questions based on these points alone: * Are status and achievement intrinsic or extrinsic motivations? * This question may be dragging us into semantics over whether the *desire* for status is intrinsic but the status itself is intrinsic. * Obviously nobody has a single motivation — even people who are strongly driven to do some esoteric thing that nobody appreciates can bias towards status * What fraction of all people are motivated by status and achievement? What fraction of people doing research are motivated by it? I’m going to slice through a Gordon knot by asserting that [[Trying to dissect intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations is a fools errand]]. You could argue over whether the desire for achievement and status are intrinsic But what about people who are motivated by other things — we could list some: curiosity about how the world works, the desire to see something become reality, (hopefully positive) impact on the world. There is one model of intrinsic motivation in which your deepest interests have an ineffable quality — purity, perhaps. Or maybe it’s not quite that but it is that there is some unchangeable “real” motivation. In this model your intrinsic motivation is often obscured by external incentives — shiny objects, what others say we *should* do, and life constraints that force us away from it. BUT if you introspect deeply enough, you can rediscover that incorruptible core. I might call this the [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]-Ian view. It has become easy to mock this view: the cartoonish versions of it are the massive body of work around “finding your passion” “unleashing your inner child” “getting in touch with yourself,” midlife crises, etc. But at it’s core, it’s still how a lot of people conceive of great research. [[newportGoodTheyCan2012]] [[alexanderLotteryFascinations2013]] To some extent this mirrors the nature/nuture debate, which as far as I can tell boils down to “it’s a complex feedback loop that makes it impossible to point to first-mover causalities.” [[Bryan Caplan]] would argue that parenting is basically irrelevant (See [[caplanSelfishReasonsHave2012]]) It’s easy to mock This can seem cynical and does seem to deny the fact that there are some people who follow some North Star that nobody else can see or explain. If you give someone knowledge The question of what someone would do with infinite resources is a good intuition pump on the role of intrinsic motivations. Let’s ignore the The easiest way to get good at a game is to convince yourself that you’re interested in it. This shift is one of the ways that [[The way people think drastically changes depending on their context]]. As a result, the idea of “intrinsic motivation” becomes very tricky. Take the case of a successful university professor: they obviously have some real curiosity and scientific question that got them into the field and kept them going. However, in order to become successful, they needed to figure out which aspects of their curiosity could be executed on on a tenure-clock timescale and were interesting to other people. Remember, [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]. The game has two parts: it’s not *just* about creating new knowledge — it also needs to be interesting to other people. As a result the professor feeds the aspects of their intrinsic motivation that are the right mixture of novel+interesting+achievable and surprises the rest. It’s not that the professor is *not* intrinsically motivated by their work, it’s that over time their intrinsic motivation becomes shaped by the game they are playing. The effect also probably works in reverse, where the selective pressures of the game mean that people whose intrinsic motivations do not have the right shape leave or are kicked out. As a result, professors often stop feeling “intrinsically motivated” to do work that falls outside of the academic game they have been playing, even if their past self would have been stoked to do it, given the agency. Of course, the poll in [[collisonWhatWeLearned2021]] stands as a counterpoint — 78% of poll respondents say that their research program would drastically change if their funding were unrestricted. My (slightly cynical) hunch is that in this case they would stop feeling the need to do work that appeals to funding agencies but would still be heavily in the academic game of creating novel insights that are interesting to the community — they would still be embedded in a game, just a different one. A corollary to this is that completely unrestricted funding to do whatever they want (which is what everybody wants right?) will still be biased in activity space by the academic game. This bias is why, despite the fact that you could argue that you are trying to manage a creative process, [[Research management matters]]. The academic game has also shifted over time to become more competitive, increasing the selective pressures on professorial intrinsic motivation, arguably making heavy-handed game shifting ([[Funding can be seen as buying time from some game to enable someone to play another game]] )even more important. (See [[The changes in the academic system between the 2020s and the 1960s means that ARPA program managers cannot fully emulate Licklider]]) The phenomena of games shifting intrinsic motivation is in no way limited to academia or research. You see the same phenomenon in Silicon Valley, where the game shapes intrinsic motivations to start companies, VC funds, etc.