I'm enjoying these posts. Each time it's another red pill. Well done!
This is a remarkably good post with which I couldn't have more fully resonated. Thank you!
There's a reason the saying "If you have to ask for the price, it's too expensive for you" exists.
That saying has more to do with poor people not having the purchasing power of rich people and less to do with rich people and their lack of stinginess.
A huge reason why lottery winners go broke is that they don't earn more money
False. Most jackpot winners (and almost all of the ones that go broke), come from the lower and less educated classes. If they were to invest their entire prize in passive investments and live off the annual returns, they'd be earning far more money than any salary they could've ever hoped to achieve with their labor. These people don't go broke because they don't earn more money--they go broke because they squander multiple lifetimes worth of upper class earnings astonishingly quickly.
there are other rich people who do earn money and who spent it lavishly.
Not in the way that was described in the original example. Note that in philh's comment, Alice "doesn't actually care very much about having this $1000 loaf over a $1 loaf," but decides to go ahead and drop $1,000 on it anyways. The overwhelming majority of ultra rich people don't spend this way. And when they sort of do, they don't stay ultra rich over the long run.
All [long-term] wealthy people care about price differences. They'd go broke if they didn't (see lottery winners). Even billionaires don't just throw their money around, because their money is still scarce and they want to spend it so as to maximize their expected utility.
Replacing bread with wine doesn't change anything; if a billionaire slightly prefers one type of wine to another, he doesn't arbitrarily pay a ton more for it. He pays the market price.
Alice would probably not want to pay $1,000 for a loaf that she prefers only slightly to the $1 loaf. She'd likely be willing to pay $1.05 or $1.10 for it. And Bob would be willing to pay $2 or $3 or maybe even $4 since he wants it so badly.
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Should LessWrong have been more open to political discourse? Might that have boosted popularity during its heyday and helped to offset the exodus of Eliezer and company?
my utility function tells me to
I agree with the first sentence. "Akrasia" is just the brain being [quite reasonably] unsure whether its long-term goals are really worth the effort.
Well that was one hell of a read. For some reason it reminded me of this old classic by Eliezer. Thanks for sharing.