I am skeptical of psychology research in general, but my cursory exploration has suggested to me that it is potentially reasonable to think there are 16. My best estimates are probably that there literally are 100 or more, but that most of those dimension largely don’t have big variance/recognizable gradations/are lost in noise. I think humans are reasonably good at detecting 1 part in 20, and that the 16 estimate above is a reasonable ballpark, meaning I believe that 20^16=6.5E20 is a good approximation of the number of states in the discretized value space. With less than 1E10 humans, this would predict very few exact collisions.
I would be really dubious of any models that suggest there are less than 5. Do you have any candidates for systems of 3 or 4 fundamental desires?
That covers all known activities directly, or with only one layer of abstraction in the case of ceremonies, fights, etc., for hunter-gatherers up until the invention of agriculture.
I see. I feel like honor/idealism/order/control/independence don’t cleanly decompose to these four even with a layer of abstraction, but your list was more plausible than I was expecting.
That said, I think an arbitrary inter-person interaction with respect to these desires is pretty much guaranteed to be zero or negative sum, as they all depend on limited resources. So I’m not sure what aligning on the values would mean in terms of helping cooperation.
Avoiding death and exploration are usually considered positive sum, at least intra-tribe.
Social standing relative to other tribe members is of course always zero sum by definition.
Reproduction is a mix usually, if babies are presumed to be literally born equal then it’s zero sum when the population is at the maximum limit of the local environment’s carrying capacity. Otherwise it can be positive or negative.
If I discover something first, our current culture doesn’t assign much value to the second person finding it, is why I mentioned exploration as not-positive sum. Avoiding death literally requires free energy, a limited resource, but I realize that’s an oversimplification at the scale we’re talking.
I am skeptical of psychology research in general, but my cursory exploration has suggested to me that it is potentially reasonable to think there are 16. My best estimates are probably that there literally are 100 or more, but that most of those dimension largely don’t have big variance/recognizable gradations/are lost in noise. I think humans are reasonably good at detecting 1 part in 20, and that the 16 estimate above is a reasonable ballpark, meaning I believe that 20^16=6.5E20 is a good approximation of the number of states in the discretized value space. With less than 1E10 humans, this would predict very few exact collisions.
I would be really dubious of any models that suggest there are less than 5. Do you have any candidates for systems of 3 or 4 fundamental desires?
Avoiding death
Reproduction
Social standing
Exploration
That covers all known activities directly, or with only one layer of abstraction in the case of ceremonies, fights, etc., for hunter-gatherers up until the invention of agriculture.
I see. I feel like honor/idealism/order/control/independence don’t cleanly decompose to these four even with a layer of abstraction, but your list was more plausible than I was expecting.
That said, I think an arbitrary inter-person interaction with respect to these desires is pretty much guaranteed to be zero or negative sum, as they all depend on limited resources. So I’m not sure what aligning on the values would mean in terms of helping cooperation.
Avoiding death and exploration are usually considered positive sum, at least intra-tribe.
Social standing relative to other tribe members is of course always zero sum by definition.
Reproduction is a mix usually, if babies are presumed to be literally born equal then it’s zero sum when the population is at the maximum limit of the local environment’s carrying capacity. Otherwise it can be positive or negative.
If I discover something first, our current culture doesn’t assign much value to the second person finding it, is why I mentioned exploration as not-positive sum. Avoiding death literally requires free energy, a limited resource, but I realize that’s an oversimplification at the scale we’re talking.
Less != zero, or negative