By contrast, anything that’s *not* necessary and has obvious substitutes is worth only as much debugging effort as would make the total cost less than the next-best substitute solution. It’s a commodity. Marginal stakes contribution = cost of last option you could explore.
Conversation
Circling back to topic: low stakes = high strife. There’s literally nothing anyone seems to want on the other side of (say) decarbonizing that inspires the sacrifices being demanded of all. It’s cliche but “Mars settlement” actually is the best idea around and only inspires ~20%.
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Let’s be clear that pain avoidance, no matter how huge, is still finite and therefore a cost, not stakes. It’s the price-to-minimize of life, not the value of living.
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Let’s say worst-case climate models are correct and we’re looking at 5 gens of extreme pain for say 100b human+animal souls. Add it all up with adequate kinship-discounting.
It still won’t be stakes. Just costs. Why is life worth it for any of the 100b souls in the formula?
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This imponderable is why stakes=costs people studiously avoid and taboo discussion of euthanasia and antinatalism. If a trivial solution exists to solve pain (don’t make babies, commit suicide painlessly) it subverts most of their logic. So ban all talk of that solution.
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I like to keep that option in the picture as a null hypothesis. If you can’t imagine a future with more worthwhile stakes than the cost of the trivial pain-elimination solution, you’re not really trying.
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The thing about priceless stakes is that they can actually be pretty transient. So long as they do the fractal-eternity thing, there’s always a next grain of sand to see the world in. If McNugget sauce keeps you interested today and next week it’s Mars rovers, that’s fine.
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The key is to bootstrap a receding horizon into infinite time one way or another. In a way stakes is curiosity about how something in motion today will turn out past a horizon of prediction/planning. You can’t see it so your only option is to live to see it.
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You either die a hero or live long enough to watch the sequel.
Choosing life is always a kinda villainous option. The truly good are always acting dead. Goodness is stakes blindness. All is pain because that’s all you can feel.
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A lot of this thread is what people usually discuss under the heading of Meaning Crisis,™ which I increasingly dislike. “Meaning” imo is an unhelpful concept. “Stakes” is better. The thing against which the cost-of-living is evaluated as either worth it or not.
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The physical metaphor of a stake — a spike driven into the ground to claim a part of the universe besides yourself is great. A declaration of a non-minimal life. Its meaning or lack thereof can be set aside. It’s your point of positive involvement with reality.
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I think “meaning” frames are popular because they’re backwards compatible with religion. They tend to inspire religion-like efforts to conjure new stakes to replace subverted ones. “Nostalgia for the Absolute” as George Steiner called it. It’s a bad design pattern.
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Of the many religion knock-offs, modern fiat money is probably the best. Most of the features of religion with only some of the awful bugs. Plus it solves some problems and alleviates some pain too. More so than religion ever did.
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That’s the bar for shared stakes. The thing to beat in the stakes-raising/meaning olympics.
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Personal aside: I recently realized that a lot of my time that I privately code as downtime/shitposting time is really stakes-raising time. Many activities, such as tv and Twitter serve to raise stakes for me. Pump it back up when it runs low. Stakes are a flow not a stock.
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I need a higher fraction of my duty cycle devoted to stakes-raising because I’m meh on most of the usual ones that seem to work for most people.
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It’s like being battery powered and charged by solar panels vs being on the grid.
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This is possibly why my new spirit animal is a Mars rover. Thing gets about 6h activity on good charging days whether solar or RTG)
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Replying to
I googled it to check and the physical objects do seem to have inspired the conceptual usage
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