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Multiheaded comments on Money: The Unit of Caring - Less Wrong
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What does it mean if you have no units of money to spend? It seems rational to accept that, if I do not have enough money to pay for my own food, then society has deemed me too worthless to survive; and if I do not have enough money to spend on influencing the future, then society has deemed my desires not worth considering.
This is clearly true, but how is a human self supposed to survive that realization, and maintain the self-esteem necessary to go out and attempt to acquire money?
Nice one! Well, as a straight answer, 1) the present society is just plain indifferent/irrational/banally-evil, so its collective distribution of money does not map to its collective distribution of utility, and 2) one's values are always selfish in a tautological sense, and so one should attempt to impose them on the world - even in the face of apparent conflict with everyone whose revealed preferences do not include your values.
In other words, we should be Nietzchean egoists on the meta-level of conflicting values, even if altruism/compromise/collectivism/etc are among those values that we would want to implement on the object level.
But that never worked in the ancestral environment!
Seriously - how am I supposed to overcome the akrasia generated by my instincts screaming at me to walk out into the desert, because all the social signals around me are telling me that I'm no longer useful to the tribe?