Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is "money" the odd one out here?

Snacks and drugs both have direct, obvious 'value' to the body - food is about the simplest evolutionary case imaginable, and a host of animals will get drunk given the chance. And it's easy to make a case for 'information' as something any reinforcement learner will value and seek out, since it's essentially a prerequisite for all other learning and decision-making.

Money, though, is exclusively a proxy for some other future benefit, and lots of other examples imply we haven't made it into a strong first-order feedback loop. Money v happiness studies both show weak happiness benefits from money (once you're not in dire need), and find that "how you spend it" strongly mediates the effects. Slot machine design is devoted to the idea of intermittent reinforcement and works very hard to create non-monetary, directly limbic rewards to keep players engaged.

Given all that, "food, drugs, and info" actually sounds like a much more natural grouping to me than "food, drugs, and money". I don't know of any research here, though. Could you take a well-known study like prisoner's dilemma or the ultimatum game and get different results with non-monetary rewards, or prime people by discussing certain things they could do with the money?

One could think of money as a proxy for power and prestige. I think for social animals "Food, Drugs, Status" is a pretty decent list of priorities. Honestly, drugs looks like the odd one out there.

I mean it’s also the only way to actually get food and drugs

What?

Hunting?

Foraging?

Peyote?

Mushrooms?

Willow bark?

I'm sure the environmental folks would love it if even a small percentage of the human population started doing that on a regular basis instead of relying on agriculture and industry.

Lots of people do have gardens already

So they can have a couple tomatoes and bunches of arugula to last maybe a month or two after their harvest time? Meanwhile 99% of the food they eat still comes from agriculture.

There really is no real alternative to agriculture and food markets, besides the things that are more of a hobby than a serious option.

You're not wrong, but this is how I learned about in-season vegetables. I can keep my garden going year-round, but it took time and learning, so I'm not suggesting it's possible for everyone (especially once you take geography into account). It's hard work!

But even as a relatively staunch environmentalist, I didn't really "get" in-season produce until I tried keeping a garden 365 days a year. Now it sticks, and I have a much better idea when I walk into a grocery store of what veggies are in season. I should know, because they reflect what I'm currently trying (or know I can) grow in my garden for the given month.

Basically, the benefit isn't just that I'm buying less stuff from the grocery store.

If I tallied up all we spend on our garden and divide the amount of produce we get from it by that figure, it would make Whole Foods' prices look ridiculously cheap...

Food as a Service ...

And I pay a premium for eggs from a small farm where chickens are fed well and allowed to wander.

No even whole foods is charging the correct price for goods when one takes into account the environmental impact.

How long could they survive off their garden and own produced food alone? It’s nice people have their own food production in these small ways. But it isn’t enough.

What? None of those are free. You need land to do any of that, or permits, or both.

Drugs is the direct medium. You can think of food, info, and status as things that we have evolved to desire, because they usually correlate highly with survival. The mechanism through which we desire them is neurotransmitters in the brain; drugs are chemicals which just happen to mimic the action of those neurotransmitters. And then money is a social abstraction we've created that can be traded for all of food/info/status, so we've learned through association to desire that too.

For a programming analogy, food/info/status are like API functions that all rely on the same kernel syscall, and then drugs hack that syscall without going through the API.

Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. - Obomsawin

Our brain craves dopamine releases, which signals future reward. This rewarding-ness of food, info, drugs can be converted to a monetary value and measured.

The human "plains of Africa" brain treats money as food. And prior to refrigeration in most of the world food will spoil sooner than later so you're always mindful of getting more food, which is why some people just can't stop getting more money. On some level they irrationally still believe the money they have will soon rot in the equatorial sun.

Food and information are absolute quantities. Money, in contrast, is a measure of power relative to other humans.

Money provides safety and freedom and is crucial for happiness on low to medium-income levels. However, with more money neither safety nor freedom doesn't increase significantly (sometimes it's even the opposite) hence no increase in happiness.

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