[ExI] experiment regarding ethical behaviors vs status

[John Grigg]

Eugen wrote:
I can tell you that I can't afford German cars, nevermind
luxury ones. I don't think you're driving a Cayenne or a BMW SUV
either.
>>>


Eugen, I thought you lived the life of the playboy scientist, that included
super-expensive cars, wine, women and song!  I know this about scientists
from watching Futurama and the Iron Man films.  ; )


Spike:
> Point: you can't tell a person's financial status by what she drives.


Eugen:
Yes, you can. Rich people buy a) *new* b) *latest-model* c) *big* luxury
model cars which will bankrupt poor people by fuel costs alone.
>>


I tend to agree with Spike, at least up to a point.  I remember the man who
was like a big brother to me growing up, who ran around in a beautiful
Mercedes that he bought for a song from a man in deep financial straits.
It looked really nice, and deeply impressed people in his trailer court.
lol  : )  While spending a couple of years in Louisiana, I had a landlord
who owned a Mercedes built right before WW2.  He had "liberated" it from a
German officer, during the last months of the war, and had managed to
somehow get it back to the States.  It was his pride and joy.


Anders:
>...We can do an interventional study. Please give me a lot of money, and we
>can tell whether I turn into a dick. -- Anders Sandberg,


Spike:
Anders this is impossible sir.  You have far too much residual nice hanging
all over you.  To extricate you from that deep pit of nice, that morass of
kindheartedness would be beyond reasonable national budgets and current
technology, regardless of how much filthy lucre we were to shower upon you.
We could not make you mean or aggressive any more than we could make the
three-toed sloth a carnivorous sprinter.  It's just deep within the basic
nature of the beast: sloths are slow, you are nice.
>>


I totally agree!  : )  In fact, I once did my own "niceness test" on
Anders, right in your home during Extropy 5, and he passed with flying
colors.  I totally bogarted the living room pc, to email lots of friends
about the conference!  I must have made poor Anders wait a good half hour
before I turned the computer over to him, despite his very polite
requests.  Anyone else would have choked me or broken a chair over my head,
but Anders simply inquired about my finishing soon a few times, with the
last request sounding just a little anxious.


I recently had a dream which I actually remembered (I normally don't),
where I had somehow achieved fame and fortune and I was going around being
an arrogant jerk to people.  I even "thought to myself" in the dream that I
was out of control.  I suppose this was my subconcious dealing with my
buried "Hyde" side.  I'm sure a "Freud droid" could have a field day
analyzing this dream of mine.


http://www.amazon.com/Remaking-Sigmund-Freud-Barry-Malzberg/dp/0345318617


Spike:
If d(nice)/dt is negatively correlated with d$/dt, then...
What we need are metrics for nice.  This would be a really interesting
artificial intelligence exercise.  Anders, I have followed your posts on ExI
for over 15 yrs now, and I have never seen a comment or word from you that
was unkind, even when unkind words would be amply justified.  You and Johnny
Grigg are the champions of nice, and I do deeply admire that, sir.
>>


Spike, thank you for the very kind words.  You certainly give me something
to live up to.


Spike:
Humans can easily estimate nice from reading archives, but can we write
software to measure nice?  We have a huge body of work to use as a test
subject, the ExI archives from about 2003.  We could get a group of
randomly-chosen readers to estimate a kindness metric between 1 and 10,
although I might have already accidentally wrecked it by identifying a
couple of high NQ scorers.  Would not it be cool to try to write a script
that can take those archives and match the general profile of the readers?
Any code hipsters have any ideas on how to do this?  If so it would be a
classic AI app: having an (apparently) unfeeling machine try to read human
language and measure a human emotion.
>>


I think we might need to wait a couple of decades for this to be truly
possible.  Or wait, we could have an Anders upload do it!  But he would be
too modest to name his source self as the winner.  : )


Kelly Anderson:
Deferred gratification is a key component to success. Rich have it
more than poor. Good math leads to rich people, another reason really
rich people buy used.
>>


I really enjoyed reading The Millionaire Mind and The Millionaire Next
Door, which strongly supported how being able to defer gratification, save
& invest money, not get divorced, buy used, and live relatively simply, are
all key factors to becoming wealthy.


Kelly Anderson:
As both a rich person and as a poor person, I always buy used. I
always pay cash. That's because I'm smart, and not stuck on the status
issue. Then again, maybe if I had a better car in college, I would
have attracted a saner girl, and that would have helped an awful
lot... LOL...
>>


Hmmm....  I knew of a guy in college who drove an extremely expensive
luxury car, and women would routinely leave notes on it, giving their names
and digits, with a message that he should call them up and arrange a date!
lol  But were these quality gals?  And in another instance, an ex-gf's
mother married her husband in college, because he promised her that he was
going places and would eventually become rich!  Well, he did get a PhD in
economics, but never really became wealthy (just borderline upper
middleclass), and she has spent the past forty years years making his life
highly unpleasant, in part because of his "broken" promise...


John
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