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Matt_Simpson comments on Human values differ as much as values can differ - Less Wrong
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Well, it's not relevant if the WOWer would still rather be the 100th best tennis player and suck at WOW than his current position - which is plausible, but there are probably situations where this sort of preference does matter.
He's certainly interested in the meta-hierarchy, but why can't he value the status gained from WOW slightly higher than the status gained from tennis, irrespective of how much he likes tennis and WOW in themselves?
Yes, I get that someone might plausibly not care about tennis per se. That's irrelevant. What's relevant is whether he'd trade his current position for one with a meta-hierarchy position near the #100 tennis player -- not necessarily involving tennis! -- while also being something he has some interest in anyway.
What I dispute is that people can genuinely not care about moving up in the meta-hierarchy, since it's so hardwired. You can achieve some level of contentedness, sure, but not total satisfaction. The characterization steven gave of the #1 WoW player's state of mind is not realistic.
But we're probably also wired to care mostly about the hierarchies of people with whom we interact frequently. In the EEA, those were pretty much the only people who mattered. [ETA: I mean that they were the only people to whom your status mattered. Distant tribes might matter because they could come and kick you off your land, but they wouldn't care what your intra-tribe status was.]
The #1 WOW player probably considers other WOW players to be much more real, in some psychologically powerful way, than are professional tennis players and their fans. It would therefore be natural for him to care much more about what those other WOW players think.
But like I said earlier, that's like saying, "If you live in solitary confinement [i.e. no interaction even with guards], you're at the top of your hierarchy so obviously that must make you the happiest possible."
You can't selectively ignore segments of society without taking on a big psychological burden.
You can't have high status if no other people are around. But high status is still a local phenomenon. Your brain wants to be in a tribe and to be respected by that tribe. But the brain's idea of a tribe corresponds to what was a healthy situation in the EEA. That meant that you shouldn't be in solitary confinement, but it also meant that your society didn't include distant people with whom you had no personal interaction.
But from the perspective of an EEA mind, online interaction with other WoWers is identical (or at least extremely similar) to solitary confinement in that you don't get the signals the brain needs to recognize "okay, high status now". (This would include in-person gazes, smells, sounds, etc.) This is why I dispute that the WoW player actually can consider the other WoW players to be so psychologically real.
Ah - I'd been misreading this because I imagined the #1 WoW player would interact socially with other WoW players ("in real life") like all of the WoW players I know do.
Wouldn't the #1 WoW player be spending most of his waking hours on a computer instead of socializing?
Well so far I've just been assuming '#1 WoW player' is meaningful. As I understand it, there isn't much to gain at the margins once you spend most of your time playing. Also, who says you can't be on a computer and socializing? There's plenty of time to look away from the computer while playing WoW, and you can play it practically anywhere.
Human psychology.
Your body can tell the difference between computer interaction and in-person interaction. Intermittently "socializing" while you try to play is still a very limited form of socializing.
Forget the WOWer then, how about the M:tG fanatic?
Implementation issue. Oops, wrong cop-out! :-P
Seriously: the Magic: the Gathering fanatic has social contact, but the lack of females in that social network has basically the same effect, in that it's a more limited kind of social interaction that can't replicate our EEA-wired desires.