I agree that positional goods are important even in the extreme, but:
1) I don’t think that sexual desires or food preferences fit in this mold.
2) I don’t think that which things are selected as positional goods (perhaps other than wealth and political power) is dictated by anything other than noise and path dependence—the best tennis player, the best DOTA player, or the most cited researcher are all positional goods, and all can absorb arbitrary levels of effort, but the form they take and the relative prestige they get is based on noise.
Agreed that the amount of status you can get from tennis or DOTA is path-dependent. But why do you count that as part of complexity of value? To me it looks more like we have one simple value (status) that we try to grab where we can.
In part, I think the implication of zero-sum versus non-zero sum status is critical. Non-zero sum status is “I’m the best left-handed minor league pitcher by allowed runs” while zero-sum status is “by total wealth/power, I’m 1,352,235,363rd in the world.” Saying we only have on positional value for status seemingly assumes the zero-sum model.
The ability to admit these non-zero sum status signals has huge implications for whether we can fulfill values. If people can mostly find relatively high-position niches, the room for selection on noise and path-dependent value grows.
This also relates to TAG’s point about whether we care about “value” or “moral value”—and I’d suggest there might be moral value in fulfilling preferences only if they are not zero-sum positional ones.
Non-zero sum status is “I’m the best left-handed minor league pitcher by allowed runs”
How is that non-zero-sum?
There are real examples of “non-zero-sum status”—e.g. you might feel inferior to an anime character—but the examples you give aren’t that. The sum of many small zero-sum games is still zero-sum.
It would be non-zero-sum if, for example, you’re the only person in the world who cares about “I’m the best left-handed minor league pitcher by allowed runs”. By thinking up new status positions that only you care about, or that you care about more than others, you can gain more value than other people lose.
It may be sensible, after all, to describe this sort of status as “non-zero-sum”, if such contexts satisfy these criteria:
Status within some context subjectively matters as much as status outside the context would, in the absence of the context (or in lack of participation in it)
There is no limit on the number of such independent contexts that may be created
I agree that positional goods are important even in the extreme, but:
1) I don’t think that sexual desires or food preferences fit in this mold.
2) I don’t think that which things are selected as positional goods (perhaps other than wealth and political power) is dictated by anything other than noise and path dependence—the best tennis player, the best DOTA player, or the most cited researcher are all positional goods, and all can absorb arbitrary levels of effort, but the form they take and the relative prestige they get is based on noise.
Agreed that the amount of status you can get from tennis or DOTA is path-dependent. But why do you count that as part of complexity of value? To me it looks more like we have one simple value (status) that we try to grab where we can.
In part, I think the implication of zero-sum versus non-zero sum status is critical. Non-zero sum status is “I’m the best left-handed minor league pitcher by allowed runs” while zero-sum status is “by total wealth/power, I’m 1,352,235,363rd in the world.” Saying we only have on positional value for status seemingly assumes the zero-sum model.
The ability to admit these non-zero sum status signals has huge implications for whether we can fulfill values. If people can mostly find relatively high-position niches, the room for selection on noise and path-dependent value grows.
This also relates to TAG’s point about whether we care about “value” or “moral value”—and I’d suggest there might be moral value in fulfilling preferences only if they are not zero-sum positional ones.
How is that non-zero-sum?
There are real examples of “non-zero-sum status”—e.g. you might feel inferior to an anime character—but the examples you give aren’t that. The sum of many small zero-sum games is still zero-sum.
It would be non-zero-sum if, for example, you’re the only person in the world who cares about “I’m the best left-handed minor league pitcher by allowed runs”. By thinking up new status positions that only you care about, or that you care about more than others, you can gain more value than other people lose.
It may be sensible, after all, to describe this sort of status as “non-zero-sum”, if such contexts satisfy these criteria:
Status within some context subjectively matters as much as status outside the context would, in the absence of the context (or in lack of participation in it)
There is no limit on the number of such independent contexts that may be created
What I am describing here is discussed in detail in another gwern classic: “The Melancholy of Subculture Society”.