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roystgnr comments on How To Have Things Correctly - Less Wrong
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You can also avoid the permanency of owning things by renting/leasing/borrowing/returning for refund.
EDIT: I place zero value on the fact of ownership. That is, I derive no satisfaction from knowing that something (or someone) belongs to me. I am given to understand that this is rather unusual. Of course, I value having hassle-free access to things when I need them, and often the only way to ensure this is by owning them, but when there is a choice, I'd rather not, even if it costs a bit more. Unfortunately, the society around me is not set up for this, except for really expensive items, like a place to live or a means of transportation. I wonder if other places in the world are more access- rather than ownership-friendly.
I can't seem to find it in my quotes file, but I recall once reading an interesting few paragraphs by someone explaining that capitalism allows them to "own" nearly everything they want in the world. In some sense I am the owner of a 16 inch telescope, a jet ski, a table with a gourmet meal at the best restaurant in the city, etc., regardless of whether I've gone out and bought those things and had them assigned to be my property, because at any time I could go out and buy them if the whim struck hard enough. The world is full of warehouses and store shelves and other buildings whose sole purpose is to store stuff-that-I-can-have-whenever-I-want-it. Even if the transaction costs are still high enough that I may end up foregoing some of those luxuries, just having the option is itself a kind of wealth.
And in a way this bounty of materialism leads one to be anti-materialistic. If I own all these wonderful things, why bother with the inconvenience of storing them in my own house until/unless I'm ready to really experience them?
Fortunately for you, my use of spaced repetition means I know exactly what interesting paragraphs you are talking about: http://www.metafilter.com/65284/Collect-em-all#1862024
This is indeed the exact quote I have saved. Apparently a good memory is even better than grep or a search engine, at least when the latter have nothing more to go on than keywords from a bad memory.
I'd love to hear more details on how you recalled it, though - do you have an Anki deck or something filled with particularly interesting quotes including that one? Or do you believe that your use of spaced repetition has improved your memory even for data that you're not specifically using spaced repetition to remember?
Mnemosyne, yeah.
Alternately, having all those options might also be a form of poverty, or at least disutility.
I suspect that a personification of Capitalism would find the notion of this inflationary use of "own" rather offensive. It has rather strong ideas about what "ownership" means. The personification of Free Market may also be a tad disgruntled that Capitalism is being given the credit for its work when it believes it should be respected as an individual. Neither of those is (strictly) dependent on the other.
That's an awesome perspective. I need to remember this.
You seem to conflate owning with sharing. The original meaning is "mine and no one else's". Lots of people derive pleasure from having something others don't, be at an art collection, an antique car or even a partner.
No, it's conflating ownership with potential-ownership. The idea is, I can store apples at the grocery store or in my pantry - there is basically no chance that I will go to pick up my apples at the grocery store and they won't be available for sale, so it's just trivial that I haven't spent the money on them yet.
It seems pretty silly to conflate the two when ownership implies that it is no longer an opportunity cost to acquire "your" possession, as the cost has already been paid. If you have a million dollars, you potentially own any of all the million dollar possessions on the market, but only one of them at most. Owning all of them would be very different.
Subjectively, though, I for one get that feeling. It's like "within my reach" and "owned by me" were equivalent to my brain on some level. And, when, once I've made my purchase, I find my money diminished by that same amount, I find that I feel cheated, somehow. Like accumulated money should work like an access clearance threshold, rather than a reservoir of resources across space and time. Which is economically absurd...
The comment I was replying to said
None of those qualify as "potential-ownership", they are a shared-access resource.
Is there something about "potential-ownership" that gives it a different meaning to "an item that I could potentially buy and thereby become the owner of"?
I'm confused. How are jet skis relevantly different from apples?
From the context, roystgnr meant renting jet skis for a day, rather than owning and maintaining them. You can hardly do that with apples.
No, really.
(emphasis added)
Buy, not rent.
I interpreted it as buying a service, not an object, but it's up to roystgnr to clarify.
My recollection and interpretation was buying/objects not renting/services. Picking an object like a jet ski that is probably more often rented than bought was probably a misleading choice of example, sorry.
Anyway, it's not up to me to clarify anymore - gwern found the original quote, so you can debate the interpretation of that rather than of my half-recollected paraphrasing. :-)
This suddenly strikes me as a very important issue of study.
I would be extremely relieved to find a large body of experimental evidence that would confirm the hypothesis that all those people enjoy this for other reasons, such as status display or signalling, rather than actually having part of their brain directly place actual value on being the sole owner and user of something without notions of availability or other logistical problems of sharing stuff, i.e. as a terminal value in some sense.