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Comment by mannicken | Hacker News Reader

Ah, but popularity has everything to do with measuring value.

As an analogy, gold would be a worthless piece of metal, if it wasn't for its popularity. Worth is an illusory, human-defined concept and just like anything "the worthiness of something" is ecided by majority. Perhaps because those who don't subscribe to majority's value system are weeded out in the process of evolution, unless their value system offers some incredible evolutionary advantage. And by incredible I mean "everyone is dead and unable to reproduce except for those who think that karma points are bullshit".

In reality, reality is merely a construct of our minds, and all value systems are created by consensus on which hallucinations are advantageous and which are disadvantageous. Thus, if we decide by unspoken consensus that karma points are worthy of construction of smart comments then karma points are valuable.

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You're clearly a subjectivist, a philosophical position which I as a pragmatist find useless.

I would love to sit here and debate this with you, but I have a Saturday lunch meeting in a few minutes with my old high school's football captain and prom queen. I hear that they've accomplished some amazingly valuable things. We're probably going to eat at McDonald's. We will probably spend some time discussing the latest Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele novels. After that, I will come home and watch Fox News for a few hours, followed by some sitcoms.

Gosh, it's a good thing all these are so popular! Otherwise, I would have no idea what was valuable and what wasn't.

Oh, and by the way: gold would not be worthless. It has certain intrinsic properties -- like its resistance to corrosion, its malleability, its conductivity, and its low melting point -- which have made it valuable for many uses.

You watch Fox News? Wow, the first person I have read admit that! I thought no one watches Fox News but the dumb.

So, would you disagree with the statement 'value is subjective'? What about different value systems? How do we decide which one is more valuable than another, considering we ourselves certainly have a very odd and rare value system, which considers philosophical discussions to be of a high value. Reality check: most people don't spend their time on HN discussing pragmatism and subjectivism.

As an extreme example, consider value system of a heroin addict, for instance. He or she values heroin above all. You might say his value system is inferior to yours, but how would you defend that statement? Speaking from utilitarian point of view, it's not necessarily that a heroin addict decreases society's happiness or pleasure, if he uses it as a constructive stimuli.

Speaking from a physiological point of view, we are not much different from heroin addicts. My opinion is that value systems are psychological routes by which we can get an endogenous high. Our brains have built a series of quests for us to accomplish, after which they reward us with various pleasurable chemicals.

Some people get high watching Fox News, some people get high debating philosophy, some people get high from heroin. The value of each activity is (non-verbally) agreed upon, by spending time on that activity and hanging around people who spend their time on the activity.

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