epistemic status: very rambly and speculative

The world contains a lot of people for whom personal ambition is the most important thing in the world.  They care about status, they care about amassing social success points, they care about rank and respect; they care about these things infinitely more than they care about the Joy of Making Things, or Appreciating the Little Pleasures, or anything that isn’t fundamentally about being at the top of hierarchies.

We have to do something with those people.

We could…

- Try to get rid of them / change their preferences.  Good fucking luck.  This definitely isn’t going to work, but it is going to turn into a hideous omnidirectional witch hunt under the control of the very people that it’s supposed to be targeting.

- Try to stigmatize that kind of ambition, so that it doesn’t result in personally ambitious people taking control.  It’s a nice thought in certain ways, but this isn’t happening either.  Your safeguards are not going to be capable of beating a huge group of people, many of them extremely smart, who are going to be monomanically focused on beating them. 

- Just let them be in charge of everything.  This is pretty much our current solution.  It…has its flaws.  In particular, it tends to result in the practical issues stemming from major systems being under the control of those who are more interested in status-grubbing than they are in optimizing for any more-universal values, and (if you care) the moral issues stemming from rewarding status-grubbing more than you reward pretty much anything else. 

- Create basically-harmless arenas for status competition that don’t hijack major social systems, but which do provide sufficiently-real rewards that ambitious people can genuinely care about them.  I have no real idea how this might happen, but…it seems more promising than any of the above. 

Thoughts?