I don’t find it reductionist. Incentives don’t have to be monetary. Power, status, family, morality, societal pressures, personal satisfaction, fear, all can be incentives.
Incentives are a question of what shared experience is a driving factor for a group of people.
That doesn’t remove the nuance from individuals. Just because group X lacks incentive to do Y doesn’t mean that nobody in X does Y. It’s just less useful to speak about individuals. No one cares about why my uncle Rick did whatever, but they might care why 10% of the country is doing it.
Don’t see it as reductionist, more like a callout that we’re dealing with a social feature, not some physical law.
it's essentially a trite truism/platitude. you can apply it to everything and if you don't want to delve deeper, why say it.
Incentives are things that humans create, intentionally or unintentionally. There are the selection pressure of the human cultural world but they are the opposite of natural. They are the things we can choose to change. By calling them out, we implicitly question if we should be changing them.
It can end up being a bit pseudo-intellectual on HN (say it ain’t so!), but there is a real rhetorical context in which it makes sense to talk about incentives.