Bonus is Bad For Motivation

3. March, 2011

Dan Ariely published a book last year that every manager in the world should read, especially the ones with huge salaries:  “Predictably Irrational”

When we make decisions we think we’re in control, making rational choices. But are we? Entertaining and surprising, Ariely unmasks the subtle but powerful tricks that our minds play on us.

In that book, he explains why people perform better or worse when there is a huge bonus in their pay. If the work is mostly mechanical, a huge bonus makes you perform better. But if your work is cognitive, the performance is worse than without a bonus.

One reason is that you can handle the additional stress (higher expectations, greed for the money, etc.) of a huge bonus better when you don’t need your brain for something important at the same time. Imagine that the stress of the huge bonus occupies just 5% of your brain power. Without the bonus, you’d perform at 100% instead of at 95%.

Most companies pay bonuses because of the huge workload and risk. Say the bonus is linked to achieving some goal. Imagine manager A would get a bonus but unfortunately, he won’t because person X made a mistake. This is a likely situation: High risk, remember?

What happens now?

Manager A might be angry that he doesn’t get the bonus because of X. That time is wasted. Not only didn’t he achieve the goals, he’s wasting time moping about an incentive he won’t get. Not what we want.

Or he might be tempted to cover up X’s blunder. This time, the incentive corrupts him. Definitely not what we want.

Or manager B might get a bigger bonus which A finds unfair. He might be tempted to sabotage B or at least spend some time moping why the world is so unjust.

Even when he gets the incentive, every minute he spends thinking about it is a minute lost to the company.

Incentives work perfectly for brain-dead work like repetitive, manual labor where your brain is idle and easily distracted. Here, the incentive gives you an extra reason to concentrate on the job.

But if your job includes making complex decisions, the incentive reduces the amount of mental work that you can do because it distracts you!

Related Articles

2 Comments | Philosophy | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by digulla

How Public is Your Privacy?

2. March, 2011
Malte Spitz

Image via Wikipedia

Under German law, any person can request all the data which a company has stored about him- or herself. Politician Malte Spitz of the Alliance ’90/The Greens Party did this with his mobile provider. The Vorratsdatenspeicherung is a German law which requires telecommunication providers to save all traffic data for 6 months. This way, he got a whole profile about himself. ZEIT ONLINE used this data along with other public information like Twitter and Blogs to create an impressive view on Spitz’s life during those six month.

If you want to see for yourself how it feels to watch and be watched, visit this interactive website that allows you to browse his life: Mobile Traitor.

The text on the page reads:

Politician Malte Spitz of the Green Party sued the German Telekom for six months of his data retention and handed it over to ZEIT ONLINE. On the basis of this data, you can watch all his movements during this time. We matched the geodata with freely accessible information from the Internet about the delegate (Twitter, Blog posts and web sites).

The Play button starts the journey through Malte Spitz’s life. The speed control [“Geschwindigkeit”] allows to adjust the pace or stop anytime with the Pause button. The calendar below also shows when he was visiting the same place again – and you can use it to move to any point in time manually. Each vertical bar represents one day.

To the right of the map is an explanation what he did, the number of incoming and outgoing calls, how many SMS he received and sent and how much time he spent online.

All the data is available as a Google Docs table, too (“Download Datensatz“).

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by digulla

So Nie

28. February, 2011

“So Nie” (pronounced like “Sony”) is German and means “never like that.” On February, 23rd, Sony ordered a raid on Alexander ‘graf_chokolo‘ Egorenkov. Alex found the master keys used in the PS3‘s broken encryption system. Epic fail for the guys who wrote the code.

Instead of simply fixing their mistake with a patch (like the other console vendors did), Sony now tries to bully the world into submission. By setting the value of the court case to 1 Million Euros, they make it deliberately impossible for Alex to defend himself in court – just to hire a lawyer would cost € 30’000.

If he could get a good one. Otherwise, it’s just wasted money because a good (expensive) lawyer can get you in jail for damaging the fists of the plaintiff with your face. Repeatedly.

Alex’ response? “If you want me to stop then you should just kill me[…]”

So what’s in it for you? For starters, stop buying anything from Sony, the company which really likes to abuse their customers.

If you can’t live without your games, stop buying new games, only second hand ones. They are cheaper, as good as the new ones, you don’t need to be online to play them. And it’s an easy and efficient way to tell Sony how you feel about their behavior.

Unplug your PS3 and play only offline. If a game stops working, return it. That costs them more than you.

Spread the word. Nothing is as expensive as a bad reputation.

Read geohot’s new blog; he’ll announce donation requests there to pay for his lawyers.

The world is the place we make it or the place Sony makes it.

[Update] You might want to read this, too: What’s Happening in the Class Action Against Sony About Removing OtherOS? I really like this quote: “And the plaintiffs have been following the SCEA v. Hotz case, and they noticed what they believe are contradictions between what Sony says in that case and what it says in this one.” Oops.

Related Articles

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by digulla

Hunting The Innocent

21. February, 2011
child abuse

Image by Southworth Sailor via Flickr

How would you like if the government told thousands of people that you’re a pedophile?

Not much? Well, the “war” against child abuse just caused a little bit of collateral damage: Visitors of 84’000 domains got a warning that they tried to visit a site which is “… affiliated with creating, distributing, and/or storing child pornography.”

Oops. Imagine you spent years to create a reputation and it’s destroyed like that. That’s the reason why the law starts with the presumption of innocence. If you start from the viewpoint of “guilty,” too many innocent bystanders get harmed.

Which is what’s wrong with the current situation, no matter if it’s child abuse or war. The thought “no one is truly innocent” directly leads to the conclusion: “It doesn’t matter how many people we hurt, as long as at least one of them is guilty of something.” It’s an excuse for excessive abuse of power.

Justice means to find a balance between the abstract, idealistic demands of a law on paper and the actual, real-life situations. Bypassing justice is always unjust.

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by digulla

Persona Management

21. February, 2011

I’ve just found this disturbing blog: UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All

It’s about “persona management“, basically an “army of sockpuppets[sic]” that help to control some opinion online. It would allow a small group to appear as a large audience, contaminating the way in which we create trust and socialize.

I wonder what the counter strategy is for something like that.

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by digulla

What You Don’t Know About Copyright

18. February, 2011

Rick Falkvinge has a good overview over the history of copyright in his blog:

  1. The Black Death decimates scribecraft
  2. A Vengeful Daughter Creates Censorship
  3. The Monopoly Dies – And Rises
  4. The United States and Libraries
  5. Moral rights on the Continent
  6. Hijacked By Record Industry

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by digulla

New Way of Testing Pupils

13. February, 2011

Remember the horror of tests at school? The attempts to prepare, the insanely short hours of the test itself, the dreading wait for the results.

In Switzerland, pupils in the 8th grade can take a “Stellwerk Test” which works a little bit different. It’s a web based test. Instead of presenting all pupils the same questions, everyone gets different ones. Depending on the answers (correct or wrong), the program will select a more simple or more difficult question. After a while, this selection process will level out. At that point, it’s possible to calculate the level of understanding that each individual pupil has on the topic.

Unlike traditional tests, it doesn’t matter (much) if you can’t answer a question. Also, the leveling out is individual. Some pupils can finish the test in 30 minutes, others need 2 hours. That doesn’t mean the “slow” pupils are dumber; their understanding is just more “uneven”. That means the test is more fair than the traditional tests. Teachers also don’t have to come up with genuine questions every year (or make sure the questions can be kept confidential if they always use the same ones). Stealing the tests in advance doesn’t get you an advantage.

Makes me wonder when this kind of test can be used for more than math and physics. Not every school can afford a super computer like the one necessary to run Watson. Not yet.

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by digulla

Russia Abolishes Winter Time

10. February, 2011

Just saw this: Russia frozen in time by plan to brighten the bleakest winter

It’s just odd that they get rid of winter time (which is the one that our bodies are used to; in winter time, the sun is highest at noon).

I also vote for getting rid of “daylight saving time.” It always takes me two weeks to get used to the new time and I’m sure I’m not alone. On top of that, it costs millions to do it every year. Let’s admit the mistake, and get rid of this foolishness.

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by digulla

Stupid Ideas Revisited

9. February, 2011

Ever had a stupid idea? One which would instantly trigger the “that’ll never work. Ever.” response?

Did you withstand or gave you in?

Maybe it’s time to give stupid ideas more leeway. During my holidays, I started to think about a stupid idea. Really stupid. But this post is not about the idea, it’s about stupid ideas in general. Let’s look at a famous one: Christopher Columbus believed that the world was much smaller than everyone else.

So when everyone else set out eastward for India and fortunes in spices, little Christopher thought: Let’s take the shortcut. I’ll go west, land must be 4’000km away tops.

Of course, he was wrong. Earth was much bigger than he believed. But he wasn’t completely wrong: There was land. America.

So if he hadn’t pursued his stupid idea, one of the world’s largest economies wouldn’t exist. Millions of Indians wouldn’t have been slaughtered. Europe wouldn’t have made a fortune by selling slaves. The GIs wouldn’t have stopped the killing of millions by the Nazis. The Vietnam War wouldn’t have happened. Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have been to the moon. B. Obama wouldn’t have been elected 44th President.

A stupid idea can change the world.

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by digulla

The Audacity of Hope

29. January, 2011

I’ve just started reading “The Audacity of Hope” by Barack Obama. In the first chapter, he talks about a change in how politics are being made. Before the change, people would reason which each other and seek compromise. With the change, they started to go for the jugular.

Which got me thinking: Yeah, I feel the same way. For some reason, people got more radical and absolute in their beliefs. More fanatical. Fundamental. Even here in Switzerland. But why?

Desperation.

We all have a growing feeling of helplessness. The flood of information that overwhelms us every day creates an illusion of “I know everything” and at the same time, our options to influence even the things at our fingertips seem to vanish. Bills are passed that make you weep because of their stupidity. A small group of people (several thousand) ruin the world economy for billions and get a bonus for it instead of 120’000 years of prison. Some art project is supported with millions of tax money but the street in front of our house keeps its holes. Companies announce billions in revenue while our bridges collapse.

So the desperation is a result of the feeling that the world is falling apart and can do nothing about it. The constant flood of useful information is fueling our own fears of insignificance.

It’s the same thing the politicians feel. When something comes up, even the worlds best expert can’t tell them anymore how to fix it. The world has become too complex to control and thanks to the many source of information we have today, we know it.

So what can we do about it?

Nothing. Accept it.

Or maybe you can stop reading newspapers and watch TV. Or at least stop watching the news casts and documentaries. Most of the information you receive this way will only make you mad or fuel your feelings of helplessness. So getting to know more doesn’t help. Focus. Get a local newspaper unless you can change things on a bigger scale. Take a hundred bucks, drive to your local do-it-yourself, buy a bag of gravel and fill the holes in your street yourself. Instead of shoveling your good money into a financial system that can ruin a medium-sized country like, say, America, search for local entrepreneurs and give your money to them. That way, you at least have a face to scream into when it’s gone. Or maybe it makes the place where you live a better one. Hollywood is already good enough.

Do you really need that 60″ LCD TC? How about taking a week off instead. To fix your house. So you smile when you return home instead of thinking about all the things that you can’t or should change.

The audacity of change.

Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by digulla

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »