One of my growing convictions is that values (either explicit or revealed preference in market/non-market environs) simply don’t matter beyond one big purpose: coalition formation through virtue signaling.
Behavior is 99% shaped by imitation of what you see working for others.
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Have you seen machine learning papers showing basically this? That winning algorithms use 90-99% social imitation as their strategy
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To a first approximation, yeah. You buy shoes 99% because you see they work for others in protecting feet.
The remaining 1% is decisions like non-leather for animal rights or minimalist for barefoot running ideology.
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OTOH you often don’t recognize mundane problems as problems till you see the solution. I didn’t know I needed Google until I saw Google.
We do occasionally see problems before we can solve them, but they tend to be big fantasies (flight, immortality...)
Taleb’s example of suitcases on wheels is a good one here. Why it took till the 1960s before somebody thought of putting wheels on suitcases is unclear.
Possibly. Or people with marble-floored palaces also had servants whose well-being they didn’t have to care about. And bell-carts, which I think predate roller suitcases.
But point is, most people probably didn’t go around wishing for wheeled suitcases until they first saw one.
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"preferences" as expressed by whether you buy chocolate or vanilla clearly have a huge direct impact, but the word "values" tends to connote grand far-mode attitudes that as you say mostly matter via coalition formation.
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I mean but people constantly adopt values that are incredibly bad at forming coalitions. Countless radicals get persuaded by some set of arguments and end up basically dropping off the social graph because they don't have any in with anyone else as a consequence.
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