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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying it forever: prestige is the #1 driver of human motivation, and because of this humans do not scale. The prestige party destroys forward progress with empty displays of acquired crap.

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Different people are driven by different motivations. The people most driven by prestige also want to be highly visible because prestige is ultimately a social construct.

status is used as a proxy when forced to make a judgement with insufficient time for doing your own research. the more fundamental resource here is limited time. So you can blame the laws of physics for that.

Could this also be applied to politicians? (their status as a proxy)

I don't think many people would dispute that a politician's primary job is to obtain lots of prestige and use it to persuade people. They certainly don't tend to be domain experts on every particular issue they discuss, although that happens from time to time.

You can be actively anti-status seeking by valuing, rewarding, and praising people who are not seeking status. In this way we can be the change we wish to see.

Lobsters are over 350_000_000 years old. Their place in the dominance hierarchy gets signalled in the same way in our brain, with serotonin. The parallel to serotonin deficiency in depressed people is intruiging.

What?

Is that 12 rules for life? Great book.

What do you mean by humans do not scale?

I think he was referring to this part of the article:

"The psychology professor Geoffrey Miller suggested that as intelligent species become technologically advanced, they spend more time entertaining themselves than on interstellar space travel. Rather than actually going to Mars, they spend more time pretending to go to Mars via movies and video games and VR."

True, but to a limited extent.

Recent successess of SpaceX, RocketLab etc. seem to have reinvigorated interest of the young engineering generation in space exploration to a degree unseen in the 1990s. Working on a Mars rocket is much cooler than working on user tracking systems in some giant tech corporation.

Watching something like Starship really launching from the Earth beats hundreds of hours of video games squarely.

This sounds a lot like the people at SpaceX, RocketLab, etc are actually building rockets to entertain themselves.

Yes, and the point is that this entertainment isn't virtual and that it actually pushes the entire civilization forward instead of causing a hedonistic stagnation.

Private progress into space shouldn't be celebrated. If rich people get there first, they'll use it for ill. What Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk's forays into space, and the news frenzy around them, show is how embarrassingly we've let our government, with R&D underfunded for decades, fall behind.

It's not impressive that a billionaire can take a space trip. Big fucking deal. We put someone on the Moon in 1969 and haven't been back since the '70s.

Humans in general are capable of evil, not just private actors, and I fail to see how governmental activity in space was, on average, more honorable than whatever Musk or Bezos are planning to do there.

By far the most space-interested arm of a government is the military and plainclothed spies. Neither are particularly morally virtuous.

I mean that as a human group/tribe/corporation grows the organization and preservation of the organization dominates the goals of the organization far more than the original purpose of the organization. Do the Republicans actually want to dismantle democracy and impose a fascist government? Hell no, but the organization is going to have to create a fascist government to continue, or cease to exist in their current form. This situation is present for all dominating organizations.

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