Well thought through, good work! Though I wonder if you have any insight into what (intuition?) generates the conclusion:
For the most part, the people who have had the biggest positive impact on the world haven’t had their impact by “earning to give.”
Thorough out human history it’s probably true, though I wonder if that is partly because 1) “earn to give” has never been practiced to any large extent (at least to my knowledge) 2) people (including myself) tend narrate great advances/discoveries in terms discoverers and persons in close proximity to the event—but not so much to the people in the background that nonetheless made it possible. I’d like to hear your thoughts!
I hope this is worth saying: I’ve been reading up a bit on philosophical pragmatism especially Peirce and I see a lot parallels with the thinking on LW, since it has a lot in common with positivism this is maybe not so surprising.
Though my interpretation of pragmatism seems to give a quite interesting critiquing the metaphor of “Map and territory”, they seem to be saying that the territory do exist, just that when we point to territory we are actually pointing to how an ideal observer (that are somewhat like us?) would perceive the territory not the actual territory because that can not be done, since we need some kind of framework. Quite probably I’m just falling for the old trees falling in the forest fallacy. So am I thinking strait? And if I do, does have any consequences?