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faknur's avatar

I think that some people pursue money and then spend it all on status signals, and that this is not a good life. I also think this has been generally acknowledged that this is a sort of addictive vice like drugs or gambling. Therefore, people are motivated to talk about how you shouldn't do it, the same way they say things like "crack is wack" or "crime doesn't pay". So one explanation for talk about what money can't buy is part of this genre of warnings about a vice. With that in mind it's surprising to me that the list you reposted includes "47. Class." I would have thought that the whole point of this list was to warn against pursuing money to spend on status symbols, which is sort of like spending it on class.

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Jalen's avatar

Measuring someone's internal emotional state seems particularly vulnerable to corruption to me, at least on the face of it. i.e. relative to other things we want to measure, with internal emotional state it seems particularly hard to find reliable signs of that state which are hard for the person in question to fake. Due to the fact that they are all mediated by the person in question. (Though of course we might be able to find some signs for which faking is costly enough to stop it....)

But I'm probably missing something. What are some examples you have in mind of other things that are equally easy to corrupt the measurement of and yet which we successfully measure?

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