the most upsetting thought-seed that keeps germinating in my mind, that I can't seem to shake or remove, is the idea that almost ALL of human behavior (outside of pure subsistence) is about playing games of social control. That it's so typical that most people don't even see it.
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though the first lemma of that should be "what counts as pleasure in your society, and in your individual psyche, and why?" a lot of stuff is probably lizard-brain level biological programming. how much is just the fruits of social control games planted long ago though?
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That's true: "self-justifying" behavior varies from person to person. I agree that status games (which are very related to but subtly distinct from control) are baked deeply into the human brain. Status seems deeply tied to mating success, and thus is selected for...
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one of the example questions that bubbled up while I was thinking about this is "why do people enjoy sports spectatorship?" there's no lizard-brain hedonic explanation for that. if you'll forgive my amateur neuroscience, it seems like that's a whole lot of neocortex shit.
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Mirror neurons?
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say more please
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Aside from the tribal stuff involved in sports, watching professional athletes do a thing gives some of the same mental activity as actually doing the thing, via the so-called mirror neurons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_coding_theory …
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Weird that was entirely the wrong link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron …
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As far as I can tell, most of my desire to control other people ends with me living a lifestyle in which I feel good as much of the time as possible. "Good" isn't necessarily pleasure, but sometimes it is. I think Yudkowsky discusses "the life people want" in his Fun Series.
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ok, so assuming you succeed in controlling people enough to achieve a life full of hedonic rewards. then what? how do you maintain that life? what do you have to continue doing in order to remain in that position?
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Indeed, part of any long-term lifestyle plan would be figuring out and executing the details of how it's sustainable before I committed to the lifestyle :) But usually this involves money, which Simler in "Minimum Viable Superorganism" calls "industrial-grade prestige status"...
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so you get "fuck you money" wealth and don't have to work again. that doesn't particularly mean you get to stop worrying about money. it means you're now worrying about institutional threats to money, and your status game now extends to millions of people instead of dozens.
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"industrial grade prestige" indeed, but "institutional threats to money that threaten my lifestyle" seems a much smaller and easier to live with fear than "having enough money to survive day-to-day" -- and again, influencing others is merely the means toward the lifestyle end
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for some perhaps, and maybe that's the good news. and then there's Koch bros (and their many equivalent actors)
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true. I wonder if it's possible to determine the extent to which a person can be satisfied with their achieved degree of prestige/status achievement. Are there some who would never be satisfied short of becoming Supreme Monarch?
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I think if you've got the dominator/totalitarian program running on overdrive even Supreme Monarch doesn't satisfy you. nothing will. hence the ancient emperors and pharaohs obsessing over immortality etc.
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