that the main guiding principle that most people use to drive their decision making, on a conscious or (more frequently) unconscious basis, is that they desire to control the thoughts and behaviors of other people.
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Replying to @danlistensto
what about seeking pleasure for its own sake? what are these ends for which others are the means?
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Replying to @simpolism
it's a reasonable question and while I can find some instances of people deriving pleasure through social interactions related to dominance/control ames (actually a lot of examples of this) I definitely can't write all of it off that way. pleasure-seeking is a thing too I guess
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Replying to @danlistensto
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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Replying to @simpolism
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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Replying to @danlistensto
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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Replying to @simpolism
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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Replying to @danlistensto
"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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Replying to @simpolism
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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Replying to @danlistensto
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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Replying to @danlistensto @simpolism
It's not stupid to worry about succession when you're a monarch.
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