stack ranking

date initiated: 2023 October 27
last updated: 2023 November 27

For some reason, it hadn’t been immediately obvious, or it wasn’t salient, that people’s differences can be framed as a difference in stack ranking. Technically this could just be called ‘priorities’, but somehow this aspect falls to the background with this term, at least for me.

People rarely disagree that values are good; this is perhaps tautological.

The difference/contention is in the stack rank, of when tradeoffs are inevitable and there are hard decisions to make – and then in such contexts, which do you choose?

The question is often not whether it is important, but what is more important.

Perhaps the inclination for this kind of thinking is a personality thing, I vaguely recall commiserating with someone of how I used to imagine emergency/disaster scenarios as a kid for fun, to explore what I actually cared about, of what I should direct my attention to when where you apply attention to is high stakes. I see this similarly with budgeting, of when you have financial constraint, what has greatest ROI in that context? I’m not exactly sure why, but people don’t seem to usually think of tradeoffs/opportunity cost. Maybe they don’t like considering constraint? Perhaps they find optimization problems tiring?

It’s probably a coincidence, but it’s interesting how it’s the opposite with interpersonal optimization: social status is often seen as a zero-sum game, so people optimize for relative wealth; they don’t mind having less absolute wealth if it means that increases the hierarchical distance with their competitors/peers (where they’re on top, of course).

Addendum [2024/02/15]: Regarding zero sum games vs positive sum games (we will ignore negative sum games because they seem not fun and because we can): I think this framework mostly makes sense assuming this is a zero sum context. i.e. assuming that your time is finite, your money is finite (because you’re lazy like me and not good at earning more money) – people know how to optimize zero-sum games, so why do they not apply it here? What is the more prevailing framework(s)?

[ ]