This is a good chance for me to interrogate my priors because I share (although not very strongly) the same intuitions that you criticize in this post. There’s tension between the following and my desire not to live in a bland tall-poppy-syndrome dystopia where nobody ever wants to accomplish great things; I don’t really know how I’d resolve it.
Intuition 1: Social praise is a superstimulus which titillates the senses and disturbs mental tranquility. When I tell a joke that lands well, or get a lot of upvotes on a post, or someone tells me that something I did years ago affected them in a good way and they still remember it, I feel a big boost to my ego and I’m often tempted to mentally replay those moments over and over. However, too much of this is a distraction from what’s really important. If I were a talented stock trader I’d be spending my time doing that rather than lying in bed obsessively refreshing my portfolio valuation; analogously, if I did actually possess the traits for which I received praise, I wouldn’t be so preoccupied with others’ affirmations.
More generally, we don’t want people to get addicted to social status, because then they’ll start chasing highs to the point where their motivation diverges from actual altruism. It’s better to nip this tendency in the bud.
Intuition 2: Social status is zero-sum, which means that if I spend money to gain status, I am necessarily making it more costly for others to do so. Therefore, telling people about your altruism is a “public bad” which we try to discourage through teasing/shaming. Now, some altruistic acts inherently cannot be done in a status-indifferent way (e.g. working full-time for a charity), but for something like donating money, which can easily be kept private, the reaction against doing it publicly is proportionally harsh.
Curb Your Enthusiasm—I didn’t know you could be anonymous and tell people! I would’ve taken that option!
This is a good chance for me to interrogate my priors because I share (although not very strongly) the same intuitions that you criticize in this post. There’s tension between the following and my desire not to live in a bland tall-poppy-syndrome dystopia where nobody ever wants to accomplish great things; I don’t really know how I’d resolve it.
Intuition 1: Social praise is a superstimulus which titillates the senses and disturbs mental tranquility. When I tell a joke that lands well, or get a lot of upvotes on a post, or someone tells me that something I did years ago affected them in a good way and they still remember it, I feel a big boost to my ego and I’m often tempted to mentally replay those moments over and over. However, too much of this is a distraction from what’s really important. If I were a talented stock trader I’d be spending my time doing that rather than lying in bed obsessively refreshing my portfolio valuation; analogously, if I did actually possess the traits for which I received praise, I wouldn’t be so preoccupied with others’ affirmations.
More generally, we don’t want people to get addicted to social status, because then they’ll start chasing highs to the point where their motivation diverges from actual altruism. It’s better to nip this tendency in the bud.
Intuition 2: Social status is zero-sum, which means that if I spend money to gain status, I am necessarily making it more costly for others to do so. Therefore, telling people about your altruism is a “public bad” which we try to discourage through teasing/shaming. Now, some altruistic acts inherently cannot be done in a status-indifferent way (e.g. working full-time for a charity), but for something like donating money, which can easily be kept private, the reaction against doing it publicly is proportionally harsh.