seems that with behaviour, events, abstracting context, there are different explanations depending on if incentives are dominant, as opposed to disincentives used for explanations.

i’m not sure if it’s that explanations involving disincentives somehow potentially violate enthusiasm (aversion to explicating repressive mechanisms), perhaps even enthusiasm for crude cause and effect explanations.

I see an anomaly anyway.

it appears to me that disincentives at work may have more explanatory power.

maybe a focus on disincentives demonstrates incentives failed, and failed incentives involves a contradiction of intent, or hoped for effect.

I wonder if seeing things in terms of incentives can be blinding. Perhaps behaviour controls, and ideology, that some of their force and inertia is gotten this way?

it may require considering things more by way of flipsides rather than opposites, and flipsides may have about them potentially unsettling realities.

> it may require considering things more by way of flipsides rather than opposites, and flipsides may have about them potentially unsettling realities.

Way back, I used to entertain the idea of what I called “flipside thinking”.

Shortly after, I became aware of a cartoon called “Far side” by Larsen, which embodied the same ideas that I was toying with, but went farther and did it better.

Yes, it does have potentially unsettling realities. For example the phrase “the elephant in the room”.

I also think about incentive/disincentive from the point of view of sports coaches. Eg. Basketball.

Some highly paid sports coaches give their players lots of worthless encouragement, saying how terrific they are. But the highest paid basketball coaches are always berating their players, saying how terrible they are.

Both have the advantage of overwhelming the player’s native emotions, so that are able to remain totally objective, unemotional and on the ball during play. It is claimed that the disincentive method gives the player just enough anger to be more energetic and therefore better. The disincentive contains no more information than the incentive, it’s totally what is called “destructive criticism”. Another example of practical application of destructive criticism is in old-style British army training.

I wonder whether incentive/disincentive has any connection to matcher/mismatcher personalities. I hope not.