The nuance of promotion, incentives, ulterior motives, and the benefit of the doubt - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

Hello there friends, so I've just been thinking about incentives and
companies and and the yeah, like what what motivates people to havedifferent opinions and stuff like that. And I want to use myself as an
example here because I think it's a there's a lot of nuance with the way
that we kind of automatically think that people are have ulterior motives.So, I created epic react to teach people how to learn react. And so my
question is did did I create epic react?And then say hey everybody it's
React is amazing and like is my ulterior motive in telling people thatreact as awesome and they should use it so that I can sell courses or did I
discover react and I got really excited about it and I and I just thinkthat it's a fantastic way to build it web applications and so as a result
of this I create epic reacts as well as all of my other material and stuff.To convince people to use it just because I think that it's a really great
framework. And then I finance my my free work by selling.Epic React I cantell you that it's the latter but how do you know. You can't really trust
my word for it because my I could have an ulterior motive.And I think this is the sort of thing that's really new on. So just to give
you another example, let's say that there's somebody who's really bullish
on a particular stock. They maybe it's Apple or something. And so, they
they create a YouTube channel that just goes all on on and on and on abouthow great Apple is.
Now our did they create like what order did this happen in did they createthe channel and then they say,Wow this is a great way for me to get people
to buy the stock. I'm gonna pump the stock up and then I'll my purchase of
the stock will be worth a lot.Or is it a kind of more of a combination where they are really bullish
about Apple so they buy a lot of stock and they're like man. I just this is
such an awesome company. I'm also going to start this YouTube channel to
talk about why I think it's such a you know, a great investment or
whatever.So anytime you see somebody who seems to have a conflict of interest.It's a
very very possible that that conflict of interest is the entire reason thattheir motivated to behave in the way that they're behaving or speak and say
the things that they're saying. It's entirely possible that there's that
bias and that's controlling everything.
But keep in mind like kind of walk history back a little bit and and thinkokay, maybe they really have this solid conviction and that's what made it
motivated them to go and buy the stock or what motivated them to createthis thing and pump it up because they already had that conviction and they
don't maybe have an ulterior motive.

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