MixedNuts comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong

75 Post author: Alicorn 28 August 2011 08:35AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (603)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: homunq 30 August 2011 11:50:24PM 2 points [-]

Are those responses epicycles, or are they really part of your original model?

Comment author: Kingreaper 31 August 2011 09:22:47AM 2 points [-]

The first half is part of my original model. Status only ever exists relative to a particular community.

Imagine the two islands, island 1 and island 2 came into contact; but the people of each island were extremely patriotic.

On island 1, the people of island 2 would be low status. BUT on island 2, the people of island 1 would be low status.

In the same way one can lose status in one community (ie. a church-based community) while gaining it in another (ie. the rationalist community) through a single action (ie. abandoning their past religious faith)

The second part (explaining how a zero-sum model can justify behaviour that isn't LOCALLY zero-sum) is, quite simply, obvious to me; because it is so analogous to the zero-sum nature of energy in physics (energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but there are plenty of ways for you to get your hands on more of it)