April 24th, 2008 by artfldgr

As I have been saying, capitalism is biological. The way it works when there is no state mobster taking a cut, is that we accomplish mutual exchange that makes us happy. If the exchange doesn’t make us happy AND we are free to decline, that is how capitalisms value system works. The key to making a lot of money is to make people happy. EVERY invention can be stated in terms that way in capitalism. Every improvement that people seek to patent is to make some set of people happy. And when people are happy they part with money. Movies make us happy, movies rake in a lot of money. Poor products don’t make us as happy as good products, so if we have a choice, we spend more to be happy with that choice. However we are free to value the money more for the future, and accept the poor product as a better choice given our goals.

Once again, modern science is showing that our social organization is biologically imposed by our biology’s likes and dislikes and its solution to the problem of having to be incredibly efficient and safe in order to have such big brains.

It was Robert a. Heinlein that said
“Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men.”

And we are finding out that this is true, along with other “truths” our ancestors knew because they were closer to life than we are and farther from fantasy and ideology.

though again Heinlein points out:
How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?

Here is to removing Delusions.

Praise = money?

Why are we nice to others? One answer provided by social psychologists is because it pays off. A social psychological theory stated that we do something nice to others for a good reputation or social approval just like we work for salary.

Consistent with this idea, a research team led by Norihiro Sadato, a professor, at the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences, NIPS (SEIRIKEN), and Keise Izuma, a graduate student of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, in Okazaki, Japan, now have neural evidence that perceiving one’s good reputation formed by others activates the striatum, the brain’s reward system, in a similar manner to monetary reward.

The team reports their findings on April 24 in Neuron (Cell Press).

The research group conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments on 19 people with monetary and social rewards. The acquisition of one’s good reputation robustly activated reward-related brain areas, notably the striatum, and these overlapped with the areas activated by monetary rewards. These results strongly suggest that social reward is processed in the striatum like monetary reward.

Considering a pivotal role played by a good reputation in social interactions, this study provides an important first step toward neural explanation for our everyday social behaviors.

Source: National Institute for Physiological Sciences

Turns out that these oppressive concepts in which we judge people by their reputations, their associations, and their current position in a heirarchy we respect, is and was why western civilization and judeo christian culture was so much more productive than all the others and made a lot more people happier. Culture amplifies or dampens our biological proclivities to acheive more benificial outcomes. The outcomes defined by what is amplified and what is dampened, if bad is amplified more than good, then outcomes decline, success falls, and people start searching for some other culture that has the right combinations that will result in a better interface to the world, and commensurate productive reward.

I guess Heinlien had an answer for that too:
One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.

and

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”