Well, yeah. Your view seems reasonable enough on its own terms. The reason I’m being a bit naggy in the comments here is because I’ve got my own pet framework, which has some claim to being the next step after yours in terms of improving life outcomes :-) The market thing. I’ll try to explain why I like it so much.
There seems to be a natural progression in how people think about success:
1) Success comes from being better than others
2) Success comes from ~some mind hack~
3) Success comes from trading with others
Imagine you’re unhappy about your lot in life. The natural response is to grit your teeth and follow (1), trying to improve yourself so people flock to you. That’s a healthy response in many ways. But then there are so many self-help books explaining how reality is in your mind (2), and you can look at it differently to get ahead! That sounds like an amazing opportunity, but to me it’s not much different from (1). You’re still trying to improve your position, like everyone else, but now you’re also using shortcuts. Like everyone else.
The real jump is from (2) to (3), where you realize that you can’t succeed alone. You’ve got to pull someone else along. And once you accept that, you no longer have to worry about 15 year old kids who can beat you at everything. Their existence becomes irrelevant to your success, because comparative advantage allows you to make win-win trades with anyone on Earth, up or down the skill tree. You don’t have to beat anyone, or change the game, or change your mind, or do anything unusual at all. It’s one of the most liberating ideas I’ve ever encountered.
I like this a lot as well, I was operating under assumption (1) until probably 2 or 3 years ago, until I realized the main value I derive from being better than others is the warm fuzzy of immediately teaching them the thing. So success (1) is self-defeating.
To fully appreciate this I had to disentangle the warm fuzzy of “pretending to teach while lording over” which is admittedly good but nowhere as good as actually watching the other person improve because of my efforts.
Your view seems reasonable enough on its own terms. The reason I’m being a bit naggy in the comments here is because I’ve got my own pet framework, which has some claim to being the next step after yours in terms of improving life outcomes
Valentine isn’t a hedgehog about this framework. The point of calling it a fake-framework is to make it clear that it isn’t the one-framework to explain everything. Given that frameworks are useful intuition pumps having multiple useful frameworks allows you to generate more useful ideas.
Not all value exchange is about market-based trading. David Ronfeld lays out Tribes/Hierarchies/Markets/Networks in “In Search of How Societies Work”.
When I ask on StackExchange a question I don’t think it’s helpful to think of how I trade with the person who will answer my question.
It’s more useful to think in terms of roles. There are certain cultural exceptions by the StackExchange community and when I write StackExchange answers it’s more useful to think about living up to those norms than thinking about how to trade with people answering.
StackExchange follows network norms of value creation.
Huh? StackExchange has karma! So does LW. The value exchange mechanism is exposed for all to see. Reputation systems are designed markets. They also complement goods markets (Amazon, eBay, Yelp). And there’s intermediate cases like social media, where companies promote their content by making it upvote-worthy. Thinking that you do stuff to follow norms misses the point: you follow norms to make a profit.
Popper made the point that one of the problems with Marxism is that the Marxist has no problem to see any conflict as being about class struggle. In the same way you can see every problem as being about market and fit them into that perspective.
On StackExchange you find bad question and answer getting downvotes even when that costs the people who downvote karma. You wouldn’t expect that behavior to happen as often it it would be a market where participants purely optimize for getting their questions answered, earning karma and badges.
People desire to do work on StackExchange that doesn’t bring them karma. People work through review queues even when that doesn’t bring them karma to help the project.
If you start to look at a problem with multiple lenses you see more aspects of it and that helps generating new solutions.
Trade is one way to have an economic interaction where value is created, because each of us might value something twice as much as the other, so when we trade, we get more value. But we can also create value where no value existed before. If you and I play a game together that we both enjoy, we’re not trading something: we’re creating new experiences that we value. If you and I start a company together, we might be selling our products on a market, but the value we’re creating by working together is probably something that neither of us had on our own, therefore not well-modelled as a “trade”.
Some might argue this is the same as 3, but it seems like an important distinction to me, and very relevant to improv, also.
Well, yeah. Your view seems reasonable enough on its own terms. The reason I’m being a bit naggy in the comments here is because I’ve got my own pet framework, which has some claim to being the next step after yours in terms of improving life outcomes :-) The market thing. I’ll try to explain why I like it so much.
There seems to be a natural progression in how people think about success:
1) Success comes from being better than others
2) Success comes from ~some mind hack~
3) Success comes from trading with others
Imagine you’re unhappy about your lot in life. The natural response is to grit your teeth and follow (1), trying to improve yourself so people flock to you. That’s a healthy response in many ways. But then there are so many self-help books explaining how reality is in your mind (2), and you can look at it differently to get ahead! That sounds like an amazing opportunity, but to me it’s not much different from (1). You’re still trying to improve your position, like everyone else, but now you’re also using shortcuts. Like everyone else.
The real jump is from (2) to (3), where you realize that you can’t succeed alone. You’ve got to pull someone else along. And once you accept that, you no longer have to worry about 15 year old kids who can beat you at everything. Their existence becomes irrelevant to your success, because comparative advantage allows you to make win-win trades with anyone on Earth, up or down the skill tree. You don’t have to beat anyone, or change the game, or change your mind, or do anything unusual at all. It’s one of the most liberating ideas I’ve ever encountered.
I like this a lot as well, I was operating under assumption (1) until probably 2 or 3 years ago, until I realized the main value I derive from being better than others is the warm fuzzy of immediately teaching them the thing. So success (1) is self-defeating.
To fully appreciate this I had to disentangle the warm fuzzy of “pretending to teach while lording over” which is admittedly good but nowhere as good as actually watching the other person improve because of my efforts.
I’d be excited to see a top-level post from you elaborating on this with some examples.
Valentine isn’t a hedgehog about this framework. The point of calling it a fake-framework is to make it clear that it isn’t the one-framework to explain everything. Given that frameworks are useful intuition pumps having multiple useful frameworks allows you to generate more useful ideas.
Not all value exchange is about market-based trading. David Ronfeld lays out Tribes/Hierarchies/Markets/Networks in “In Search of How Societies Work”.
When I ask on StackExchange a question I don’t think it’s helpful to think of how I trade with the person who will answer my question.
It’s more useful to think in terms of roles. There are certain cultural exceptions by the StackExchange community and when I write StackExchange answers it’s more useful to think about living up to those norms than thinking about how to trade with people answering.
StackExchange follows network norms of value creation.
Huh? StackExchange has karma! So does LW. The value exchange mechanism is exposed for all to see. Reputation systems are designed markets. They also complement goods markets (Amazon, eBay, Yelp). And there’s intermediate cases like social media, where companies promote their content by making it upvote-worthy. Thinking that you do stuff to follow norms misses the point: you follow norms to make a profit.
Popper made the point that one of the problems with Marxism is that the Marxist has no problem to see any conflict as being about class struggle. In the same way you can see every problem as being about market and fit them into that perspective.
On StackExchange you find bad question and answer getting downvotes even when that costs the people who downvote karma. You wouldn’t expect that behavior to happen as often it it would be a market where participants purely optimize for getting their questions answered, earning karma and badges.
People desire to do work on StackExchange that doesn’t bring them karma. People work through review queues even when that doesn’t bring them karma to help the project.
If you start to look at a problem with multiple lenses you see more aspects of it and that helps generating new solutions.
I would add:
4) Success comes from collaborating with others
Trade is one way to have an economic interaction where value is created, because each of us might value something twice as much as the other, so when we trade, we get more value. But we can also create value where no value existed before. If you and I play a game together that we both enjoy, we’re not trading something: we’re creating new experiences that we value. If you and I start a company together, we might be selling our products on a market, but the value we’re creating by working together is probably something that neither of us had on our own, therefore not well-modelled as a “trade”.
Some might argue this is the same as 3, but it seems like an important distinction to me, and very relevant to improv, also.