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BenAlbahari comments on The Price of Life - Less Wrong
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Comments (35)
Your point is valid. Sometimes the genius and the curse of a pithy quote is you find it really meaningful, and then later find out someone else has a really different interpretation of the same quote! It's an interesting topic in itself as to whether the ambiguity present in literature and poetry - which is regarded as a good thing - encourages us to simply hear what we want to hear. To me, the connotation of Wilde's quote was that it's a bad thing to be aware that everything has a price, and the truly valuable things, e.g. "the smile of a baby" (the cuteness of a bunny?) are priceless. That's the connotation I object too. I'd agree that it's not the one and only connotation.
That could be implied by larger context, but the quote, as it stands, only expresses the idea that prices and values are separate things. It could be that there was some meaningful conversion chart, or it could be that there wasn't. If we take that there isn't any chart for some things, it still doesn't imply that the price was infinite, it just means that talking about price doesn't make any sense. Analogy would be measuring happiness in kilograms. Lack of conversion chart doesn't imply that happiness means infinite kilograms.
The disconnect between values and prices could be described as something like "It has a high price because many people value it", not the other way around. Values are why we do things, and losing sight of those, staring only at price tags without understanding why there are prices in the first place, that's what Wilde seems to describe cynicism to be.
Based on your feedback I've entirely removed the Wilde quote from the article. I see no point perpetuating a flawed concept.
Agreed, the quote in my opinion captures two important truths: that price and value are not the same thing and that value is subjective. It suggests that the cynic errs in conflating price and value and further that the cynic is also (or as a consequence) poor or deficient at making their own value judgements.
In practice anyone who ever purchases or trades anything implicitly recognizes that value is subjective and not the same thing as price but the confusion continues to trip up a lot of people.
That's well argued. I have included a footnote to your comment where I state the interpretation of the quote in the original post.
My interpretation was to read "value" as roughly meaning "subjective utility", which indeed does not, in general, have a meaningful exchange rate with money.