Comments on: Against Admirable Activities

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:18:51 +0000

Curt, not wishing you hadn’t tried does not show effort was not wasted, nor that there wasn’t effort in hope of winning.

By: Curt Adams

Curt Adams — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:31:39 +0000

Robin, I don’t think “actors, musicians, and athletes” make your point. It’s rare for even the failures to wish they hadn’t tried, so they view the pleasure of the activity and the competition as worth the costs even without the highly elevated status. Plus so many eagerly participate in those activities even with full knowledge they’ll never be anything special. I think only concious seeking for status, beyond that engendered by normal urges, would count as “wasteful” from the seeking human’s perspective. That’s fairly rare, IMO restricted to specialty fields like politics and science.

By: Peter McCluskey

Peter McCluskey — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:39:20 +0000

I doubt that I'm willing and able to take your advice to "take five, and chill". I think a better approach to minimizing the harm of this bias is to seek status in domains where few are competing, along the lines that David Friedman suggests in this post.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:45:00 +0000

Curt, I agree we gain some direct pleasure from these activities, but I argue that our effort is more than is explainable by this pleasure, because we want the status. It is (part of) this additional effort that is wasteful. To see it directly, see actors, musicians, and athletes who fail after years of enormous effort.

By: Curt Adams

Curt Adams — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:27:15 +0000

Your concern of “admirable activity” signalling as inefficient is largely directed at the wrong audience. The agents for which it is inefficient are our genes and they would indeed be better off if they could somehow collude and agree not to compete so wastefully. We, however, are programmed to enjoy doing and appreciating admirable activities and so for us they are not generally wasteful – they are, in and of themselves, a good for us. Even status seeking in general is not necessarily inefficient for humans – while it’s a waste for our genes, we get a kick out of the things that confer status. Only insofar as we seek the actual status per se is it inefficient for us.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:29:40 +0000

Eliezer, yes, status is not completely zero sum, and there can be other reasons why there might not be enough of an activity. To argue that math activity is indeed admirable, you need a concrete reason to think we would do too little of it.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 04:07:57 +0000

PS: Status is not completely a zero-sum game. Imagine one society where everyone hates everyone else equally, and another society where everyone respects everyone else equally. The hedonic impacts of emotion and behavior render these two societies distinguishable, even though the equal social statuses apparently have no input into social negotiations.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 04:04:48 +0000

Robin:

Oh, you meant costly signaling. I was thinking of the sort of signal you get over an optical fiber, not peacock’s tails. I’m probably not as familiar with the math as I should be, but in an intuitive sense I now see what you mean. Activity directed toward signaling admirableness, rather than admirable consequentialist goals, is not at all admirable; even admirable activities become less admirable, and less efficient, to whatever degree they are influenced in the direction of signaling admirableness.

“Altruistic behavior: An act done without any intent for personal gain in any form. Altruism requires that there is no want for material, physical, spiritual, or egoistic gain.”
– Glossary of Zen

However, I still think we should distinguish admirability-signaling activities from admirable consequences. Signaling admirable mathematical ability is a zero-sum game, or at least, it has major zero-sum elements. That doesn’t mean that the admirable consequence of math itself is a zero-sum game! Let us be careful not to signal rationality through cynicism…

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:29:23 +0000

Bob, I was clear to say that admiration is partly, but only partly, a relative status game. And I did not contrast admirable activities with “money” activities; making money is often considered to be admirable.

By: Bob Knaus

Bob Knaus — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:01:05 +0000

Robin, are you suggesting that “doing admirable activities” is a zero-sum game? Why should it be, if “making money” is not?

When we “make money” it is only valuable in a relative sense. So are admirable activities. But that doesn’t stop either of them from being a positive-sum game. They just have different value systems, that’s all.