Nice article. I was a bit unsure about your metaphor at first, but then the simulation part made it worth it.
One thing that occurs is that that while status games (PvP) are an efficient way to keep people occupied (low cost simulation), they’re a pretty poor way to optimise hapiness. The majority of writing on hapiness I’ve seen (psychology/budhism/philosophy of hapiness etc) seems to indicate that one secret to hapiness is to stop playing PvP (and status games). Also, my anecdotal impression of political people, and for that matter heavily-status-focused generally is not one of hapiness. Perhaps that’s because in most PvP, like you say, everybody is losing most of the time.
Maybe PvP is like taking drugs: it makes you unhappy most of the time, but it is very difficult to stop. It is something you want at the moment, but would want not to want at the moment of reflection.
PvP skills are strongly selected for by evolution. Being bad at actual fighting and/or status games generally means you are at high risk for losing in the natural selection game.
Well I’d agree that’s a force at an individual level. But there’s also mechanisms to consider like group-selection (selecting against groups that spend all their time “playing” eachother) and negative reciprocation (punishing people that carry on like arrogant *s :-) )
Nice article. I was a bit unsure about your metaphor at first, but then the simulation part made it worth it.
One thing that occurs is that that while status games (PvP) are an efficient way to keep people occupied (low cost simulation), they’re a pretty poor way to optimise hapiness. The majority of writing on hapiness I’ve seen (psychology/budhism/philosophy of hapiness etc) seems to indicate that one secret to hapiness is to stop playing PvP (and status games). Also, my anecdotal impression of political people, and for that matter heavily-status-focused generally is not one of hapiness. Perhaps that’s because in most PvP, like you say, everybody is losing most of the time.
Maybe PvP is like taking drugs: it makes you unhappy most of the time, but it is very difficult to stop. It is something you want at the moment, but would want not to want at the moment of reflection.
PvP skills are strongly selected for by evolution. Being bad at actual fighting and/or status games generally means you are at high risk for losing in the natural selection game.
Well I’d agree that’s a force at an individual level. But there’s also mechanisms to consider like group-selection (selecting against groups that spend all their time “playing” eachother) and negative reciprocation (punishing people that carry on like arrogant *s :-) )
I like this comparison.