This perfectly captures how perverse incentives warp entire industries. The parallel between witchers maiming monsters for repeat business and pharma companies managing symptoms instead of curing diseases is uncomfortably accurate. I've seen this play out in IT consulting where teams get incentivized to build overly complex systems that need constant "maintenence" rather than simple solutions. The breeding programme recommendation is the darkest logical extension tho.
I'm glad this resonated with you! And yeah, it is really unfortunate. In some ways, I think it's just working teams optimizing for the constraints of a system that is zero-sum/winner takes all. Simple solutions are usually best (i.e., Occam's Razor) but why choose simple when one can architect recurring future cash flows?!
This perfectly captures how perverse incentives warp entire industries. The parallel between witchers maiming monsters for repeat business and pharma companies managing symptoms instead of curing diseases is uncomfortably accurate. I've seen this play out in IT consulting where teams get incentivized to build overly complex systems that need constant "maintenence" rather than simple solutions. The breeding programme recommendation is the darkest logical extension tho.
I'm glad this resonated with you! And yeah, it is really unfortunate. In some ways, I think it's just working teams optimizing for the constraints of a system that is zero-sum/winner takes all. Simple solutions are usually best (i.e., Occam's Razor) but why choose simple when one can architect recurring future cash flows?!