17 Comments

I do suspect that Loss aversion is a big reason why people don't take enough angry action.

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Given your terminology, "stoically" is, at best, unnecessary and, at worse, misleading in describing some of those who are accepting.

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People know something about their own standing vs. the population a whole - they know whether they're rare outliers or not.

If you know you're not, you rationally ignore the outliers - their results don't apply to you.

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No, it is just wrong. Assuming a symmetric distribution is flawed, and one no one should be making. The average is a biased estimator.

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Some of our behavioral biases (e.g. endowment effects, confirmation bias, overconfidence) could help us to accept our fate ...

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One observation I have found helpful to bear in mind, when struggling to accept unpleasant truths, is that accepting something isn’t the same as approving of it. “This is bad/wrong/unfair” and “I can’t change it, so I should just adapt as best I can” are perfectly compatible beliefs to hold about the same thing, but it’s easy to lose sight of that, and I think that’s a key part of the process by which non-acceptance is transmuted into internal suffering. IIRC, I got that particular nugget of wisdom from learning about acceptance and commitment therapy, more specifically the concept of “radical acceptance.”

I think the world would be a better place if more people lived by that philosophy, but I’m not 100% sure. If enough people can credibly commit to flipping the table (against their individual self-interest) if things get bad enough, that places a limit on how much people in positions of power can profit by squeezing the less fortunate. That sort of dynamic seems to be important in human behavior, judging by experimental evidence with the ultimatum game, and historical cases where governments and businesses have hastily backpedaled from unpopular policy changes that they theoretically had enough leverage to enforce.

So in addition to saluting those who stoically accept their lot in life, perhaps we should also salute those who would not, as long as their threshold for Not Taking It Anymore is something that would really constitute a worse equilibrium for humanity than the status quo.

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It is nearly a tautology that one can reasonably expect to get the expected outcome.

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No one could reasonably expect rewards much above median. That would just be playing in to everyone being above average. The enormous entitlement assumed by those who do is egregious.

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No problem. Just go back and read Brave New World again: "... I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta." Read, rinse, repeat...

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Not only, but mostly. Two related points.

First, the median seems more cognitively available. I don't think people intuitively work on the basis of averages in general. This seems to match what the literature says about prestige; it's an ordinal scale. This also makes sense according to the literature I'm aware of on questions like "would you rather earn $80k in a neighborhood full of people who earn $100k, or $65k where everyone else earns $50k." The relative standing issue is what people focus on.

Second, median is easily locally computed; you don't need access to everyone's position to know where you stand relative to them, and you need fairly little information to see how much more or less money you make than the people in the middle. To find an average, you need to know a fair amount about the financial details of the outliers.

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Can you elaborate on "later people learn that in fact that other less cooperative or fair strategies actually tend to be rewarded more"?

That doesn't fit with my experience. What do you have in mind?

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Very interesting. Thanks. To me externally not acting out, is very different than accepting to the point where there is internal calm. I have no problem with the first level of acceptance, it is the second buddhist-like level that I struggle with.

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Unless you are actively causing damage now, in my terminology you ARE stoically accepting.

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That "stoic acceptance" is exactly what I seem unable to achieve.

Is that acceptance "giving up" or is it "accepting reality, yet being able to be happy about it". I know that "suffering is optional", and that lack of acceptance does not make for a happy life, yet I seem unable to "give in".

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Do you have any particular reason to think people only compare their situation to the median, not to the average?

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The trope is about people who receive much less than they expect; I'd intuitively model that as something like standard deviations below the median, not distance from the mean.

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