I previously wrote about how permissionless technology ≠ permissionless adoption.
When managing money, it's very important to understand mass behavior, incentive structures, and why people act against their own long-term interests.
Here are the four engines of mass behavior:
1) Incentive gradients (what pays now)
- People follow net-effort -> net-reward gradients, not ideals. If the reward is near-term, visible, and certain - while the cost is delayed, abstract, and probabilistic - behavior will skew short-term every time.
2) Defaults & frictions (what's easiest)
- Behavior follows lowest-friction paths. Defaults, one-click choices, and pre-checked boxes beat sermons. Tiny frictions shift billions of decisions.
3) Narrative & identity (what feels right)
- People protect self-image and in-group membership even when facts conflict (identity-protective cognition). The story that preserves belonging wins over the truth that threatens it.
4) Feedback loops (what reinforces)
- Immediate reinforcement (likes, payouts, relief) rewires habit faster than distant outcomes.
Why even "smart" people still defect from long-term:
- Meta-incentives dominate beliefs. Even smart people first decide what benefits them (status, income, network), then craft rationalizations.
- Compartmentalization. Professional intelligence ≠ incentive literacy. People who model markets still miss their own behavioral accounting.
- Social risk > factual risk. Getting ostracized today feels worse than being wrong in five years.
How to tell if you're acting against your own long-term interest:
- If the benefit is now and the cost is later, assume you're under-pricing the cost.
- If a choice preserves belonging, assume you're over-weighting identity.
- If the platform chose the default, assume it benefits them more than you.
- If the metric is public, assume it's being gamed (by you or to you).
- If a habit depends on willpower, assume it will fail under stress.
How to consistently pick long-term:
- Automate the boring: savings, skills, sleep, strength, deep work.
- Deliberately add friction to bad paths.
- Make identity explicit: tie your reputation to long-term behaviors.
People don't "fail" because they don't know; they fail because the environment pays them to fail now and bill them later - in cash, status, and belonging.
This is similar to how Bitcoiners are sabotaging themselves by buying Paper Bitcoin with no understanding of the long-term consequences.
More context:
The antidote isn't stronger opinions; it's stronger defaults and pre-committed rules. Read the incentives; expect the behavior; position ahead of it.
The concept of people acting against their own long-term interests becomes very obvious when you start asking:
- "If the default were the opposite, what % of people would still end up here?"
- If the answer is "probably <30%", the current outcome is default-driven, not preference-driven.