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Comment by Yiin | Hacker News Reader

I think you're approaching it form very high level, when you should think about it from much lower level, i.e. success is being determined by stress/dopamine hormones or similar

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The lower level seems to work eg, “Dopamine regulates decision thresholds in human reinforcement learning” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41130-y

This article is kind of vague on that tbf: To conclude, we observed no credible evidence for a beneficial effect of L-dopa (vs. Haloperidol) on reinforcement learning in a reward context, as well as the proposed mechanistic account of an enhanced striatal prediction error response mediating this effect.

So your claim is that success stories are some kind of emergent phenomenon that comes from people chasing dopamine highs?

Is that controversial? I would say everything a human does is to feel better, and everything someone does that doesn’t make them feel better immediately is just done in the expectation of even greater pleasure later.

I don’t think the human experience can be reduced down to “if feels good is true then continue else try something else”. But I could be wrong.

Well mine can, with some tactics and strategy layered on top. If I do something I don’t like, I only do it because the payoff later makes it worth it (or at least I think it will from my current knowledge).

While humans seek “profit”.

It is important that “profit”, comes in various forms, which exchange rates are problematic to calculate (or maybe there can’t be any): not hungry, not thirsty, tastes good, not cold, feel safe, feel excited, feel righteous, feel powerful, listen to music, watch a movie, get curious, satisfy curiosity, laugh, love, sex, rock n roll.

I think it is both and this is very obvious if you read Pareto and Sapolsky.

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