1. The Status‑Game Around “Being Busy” In the educated, coastal‑US environment I grew up in, replying “Honestly, slammed. Two product reviews, a board deck due, client dinner tonight” is high‑status.[1] The script signals (a) I’m important enough for people to demand my time and (b) I have a socially approved...
Epistemic Status: Somewhere between a personal life‑hack and a tentative general theory. I’ve been running this experiment for five NBA seasons; dozens of predictions‑market positions, numerous group‑chat quarrels. I am reasonably confident there’s something here, but I do not yet know how broadly it generalizes beyond U.S. team sports fandom....
1. The Status‑Game Around “Being Busy”
In the educated, coastal‑US environment I grew up in, replying “Honestly, slammed. Two product reviews, a board deck due, client dinner tonight” is high‑status.[1] The script signals (a) I’m important enough for people to demand my time and (b) I have a socially approved purpose: knowledge work. Activities that can’t be narrated as “productive” are binge‑watching Squid Games 3, playing Call of Duty online, even spending an afternoon in the sauna with friends are quietly classed as distractions.
Behind that script sits a deeper proposition:
Premise A: A worthy adult life is structured primarily around work.
Premise B: If AI automates a large share of white‑collar tasks, many of us will lose... (read 767 more words →)
Epistemic Status: Somewhere between a personal life‑hack and a tentative general theory. I’ve been running this experiment for five NBA seasons; dozens of predictions‑market positions, numerous group‑chat quarrels. I am reasonably confident there’s something here, but I do not yet know how broadly it generalizes beyond U.S. team sports fandom.
TLDR
Traditional fandom couples your happiness to the fate of a single franchise whose base‑rate chance of winning a championship hovers around ~3 %. If you instead root for stories (individual players, milestone moments, tactical novelties) and back those beliefs with small prediction‑market stakes, you harvest nearly all the social energy of watching sports while slicing your disappointment rate by an order of magnitude.
The Standard Model... (read 703 more words →)