Dog eat Dog world?

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I'm not sure where ambition comes from.

I know society rewards "winners." This sets up an atmosphere of competition.

However, I think it's also a sick cycle of abuse in society. We want our kids to be as successful or more so than ourselves, and that is not a bad thing to wish for. If we were a success in our own lives, that improves the odds for our children (as they learn from example).

However, when a person fails, they desire to see success in their children. Either by trying to live vicariously through them or because the last chance of "success" to to have produced successful children.

My dad says he loves me. On some level, I believe him. However, I know he is disappointed in how I turned out. I know on some level he is ashamed/embarrassed by me. My dad wasn't a failure, but his life didn't turn out the way he hoped. He looks to his children, and while none are in prison or on drugs, none are living financially successful lives no have any gained a position of social prominence because of their accomplishments.

The desire to just "be happy" isn't seen as enough.

If society didn't reward winners than many people wouldn't have the motivation to work hard and contribute. Some altruistic people may still contribute just for the intrinsic value.

Nevertheless, a person should be rewarded for the amount of effort they put in, not the abilities they are born with. If a person with an IQ of 90 and a person with an IQ of 140 work equally hard, the person with an IQ of 140 will achieve much more, but don't they deserve equal rewards for their effort?

I guess I'm almost preaching "the S word" here, socialism.

Motivational speaker and author Les Brown has wrote "Judge a man not by what he has achieved but what he has had to overcome to make those achievements."

It's also pretty basic morality. If you had two children and one was very bright whilst the other was very slow, and they'd both tried very hard at school so the bright one got an A and the slow one got a D would you

A. Tell them both they'd done very well and do something nice like buy them some ice cream

B. Congratulate and buy some ice cream for the bright one and tell the slow one they have to try harder.

There was once a business theory that stated "What's best for a group comes about by everyone in the group doing what's best for themselves." Mathematician John Nash proved that what's best for a group comes about by everyone in the group doing what's best for themselves and what's best for the group.

This is illustrated in a scene from the movie "A Beautiful Mind." John Nash and three of his friends were in a bar, and wanted to pick up some women. Nash had an epiphany that doing what's best for oneself and for the group can be better for a group than everyone doing what's best for themselves.

An attractive blonde was in the bar with four less attractive friends. If everyone did what was best for themselves, they would all go for the blonde and only one would get to go with her. The three guys who failed to pick up the blonde would then try to pick up her friends, and those friends feeling that they are "second best" would reject the men's advances, leaving three men out in the cold. If everyone did what was best for themselves and the group they would decide to only go after the blonde's less attractive friends, one girl for each man. This way no-one would feel second best, but rather the girls would be flattered that the men went for them instead of the attractive blonde, and each guy would end up with a girl.

I've not seen that film but nash was a paranoid schitzoprenic who actually worked on game theory, or a version of game theory anyway, for the rand corparation.

And his work on game theory was to try and show that everyone acting in a totally selfish manner at all times would result in a perfect system or society. And this has been used as the moral aurgument for capitalism for decades now.

Modern game theory focuses much more on the benifits of co-oporation, and nash is on record as saying his previous work was flawed and largly the result of his paranoid delusions and bleak view of human nature. Anyway what you're talking about here sounds quite a lot like modern game theory but it wasn't at all what mr nash preached, I think hollywood has been playing fast and loose with facts again.

Anyway for a much more detailed look at all this there is brilliant series of documentries in which nash is actually interviewed.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=t ... mb=0&aq=f#

oh, thanks for the correction oli. What I said is what does happen in the movie, so Hollywood must have got it wrong, you seem like you know what your talking about.

I watched a couple minutes of the first "The Trap" documentary, it looks interesting, I will try to watch all of it sometime.

Well actually only because I watched that documentry, it explains it all in a lot more detail.

I suppose the idea of a hero who actually came up with some very cynical ideas and was by all acounts a fairly unpleasent person didn't seem like such an attractive proposistion for the movie execs.

On an individual level, the best thing for one to do in this situation is to rat out the other suspect, because you will either get no jail time or 5 years in jail.

Taking a bird's eye view of this situation, the best thing for the group (both suspects) is for both to stay silent. This results in a total jail time of 6 months + 6 months or 1-year total. If one rats out the other, this results in 10-years of jail time, and if both rat out each other than it also results in 10-years jail time.

That's it in a nutshell, it was used originally to try and prove that selfish behaviour would always result in the best outcome. But the really interesting thing that is shown in the documentry is that when nash came up with this and they tested it on the secretaries at the rand corparation they would always choose to co-operate.

But if you try and apply all this logic to society at large I think it's pretty apperant that a society that's based on co-operation is going to do better, and probably be a nicer place to live, than one that always stresses selfishnes and competition.

Agreed oli. The Prisoner Dilemma fails to take into account inherent human tendencies for cooperation. These tendencies probably evolved to help humanity as a whole to survive. In the same vein, one of the most ruthless facets of humanity and the animal world alike, selective mating, probably evolved to weed out weaker organisms.

It seems though, that we should try to overcome our innate predisposition towards denying the weak loving relationships and sexual experience. We have these things called contraceptives now (although religious right wing nut jobs wouldn't like think so.)

On April 15 I wrote a post Movies about Aspergers and Love explaining that I thought movies in which a male protagonist with asperger's falls in love create unrealistic expectations. This would seem contradictory to the statements I just made, but I think we SHOULD have girlfriends, just that it's probably unrealistic.

Sure, men who have problems can get a girlfriend. They just should find someone of equal physical attractiveness who has the similar problems. A man with an IQ of 70 could find a girl with an IQ of 70 (although there are slightly more ret*d men.) The problem with ASD males is that not very many women are on the spectrum, it's a ratio of about 1 to 4 I believe.

Yeah I see what you're saying but I think the really important thing is that people with aspergers just aren't very far up the social hierarchy and that's why a lot of the guys don't have girlfriends. But then that shouldn't limit us too other aspies so much as other people who also aren't very high on the social hierarchy, or don't care about it.

So what I'm really saying is that were not gonna get the blonde alpha cheerleader girl, does type of girl go after the dumb jock sort of guys for the most part but there are all kinds of other girls that aren't aspies that might be interested. I think the hardest part is going out and meeting such women, extroverterd confident sort of people go out to clubs and whatever, introverted shy people tend to stay in and read books, which is great but you meet less members of the opposite sex.

But on the other hand maybe we should start pressuring the goverment to increase the amount of women with autism

Pump them full of a couple gallons of vaccines.

(for those of you who take things overly literal, I know vaccines do not cause autism)

Equal effort does not mean equal reward. Its all very well to encourage effort, but if you don't reward achievement then we are left with a society where trying and failing is ok. If that were the case, we almost certainly wouldn't have the internet, and probably be without the steam engine too.
I see nothing wrong with patting someone on the back and saying "nice try, but you failed." Give the award to the person who achieved the goal.

Where I come from, it's ok to try and fail. Succeeding is good and all if you have the ability to, but not everyone has said ability. It won't dilute society to think that it's ok to try and fail, as there'll always be someone else who'll try, and they may just achieve/succeed where you failed for they have the ability where you don't.

It's impossible to determine the amount of effort people put into things, as it's impossible to measure it, other than identifying so-called disorders that affect someone's performance compared to their peers, measuring baseline intelligence and other misc. areas of ability.

True, but socialism asks "why do we have different pay for different jobs?" The jobs that highly intelligent, highly sociable, physically strong, or highly attractive people can get paying more money is a symptom of the strong picking on the weak. Professor, supermodel, professional athlete, professional musician, CEO, actor - all jobs which require a person to be born with loads of talent and pay exorbitant money.

My question is, wouldn't people be motivated to take these jobs and do their best even if all jobs payed the same. Economists argue that we need economic disparity to make society work. But, take for example the jobs "professor" and "honey-dipper" (slang term for a person who uses a hose to suck out the "honey" from porta-potties). If these jobs both paid the same, a talented person would still chose to be a professor. Being a professor is a more complex job requiring more responsibility, but the social prestige, intrinsic satisfaction, and power of being a professor would motivate the talented. Who wants to suck the human waste out of porta-potties and get paid dip for it?

My point is that there are fringe benefits of doing a job that required a person to use their talents to their fullest extent other than higher pay.

I do not understand it. The rat race. Not at all.