I don't think that's fair. Why is "be famous" a better decoding than "be awesome?" Are you seriously telling me that you know of no one who, while they don't have celebrity status, isn't known in your community or subfield as someone awesome?
there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game.
I'm calling bullsh#t on this one. How in the world can you justify there's a finite amount of fame? Fame is basically the garnering of attention. Are you implying there's a finite amount of attention? How is this so in the face of increasing population and wealth? Not only are there more people, more of the people have more free time and access to information resources. There's more and more people able to pay more and more attention. Even if this were not true, fame still wouldn't be a zero sum game unless you've shown that everyone's attention is saturated. I posit that there's still room for growth.
In 2011, there are a finite number of people whose attention a person could have. Each of those people has a finite number of seconds of attention to devote. Wealth cannot yet increase that number, though it can enable you to devote attention to other things.
Fame and status are not like wealth; they are zero sum.
In 2011, there are a finite number of people, corporations, and sovereign entities which can be said to own wealth. Wach of those has a finite total number associated with their various bank accounts.
Yet no one who is still taken seriously says wealth is zero sum.
If your point is holds true, and we are at saturation for attention, then if radio contact was made with an alien probe tomorrow, the amount of attention people are paying to the news would not change, but merely more of it would be devoted to your discovery.
That's crap -- the overall amount of attention people are paying to news would actually increase. Other stories would indeed be overshadowed (hence your confusion in thinking attention is zero-sum) but the total amount of attention would not be constant. Instead, it would crest like flood-level waters moving downriver.
The total amount of attention being paid to news is not constant.
The total amount of attention being paid to news is not constant.
This is an interesting rhetorical trick: present a slice of the pie as the entire pie, so that when the size of that slice grows, you can claim that the pie was actually infinite to begin with! Nice.
The difference between wealth and attention (as your carefully selected example shows that you actually already know...) is that you can create wealth without taking decreasing anyone else's wealth. Three people on a desert island can become wealthier all at once. However, there are only a certain number of things anyone can "pay attention to" at once, because paying attention to something necessarily means decreasing attention to something else.
the total amount of attention would not be constant.
If you limit yourself only to the slice of total attention you have called "news", then you'd be right. But most of the time I'm paying attention to things other than news. Some of those other things include celebrities, even.
hence your confusion
I believe you misspelled "conclusion", here. :) Confusion only arises if you start from the assumption that attention paid to online games, programming, blogs, texting someone, getting a drink, or going for a drive, isn't attention at all, because it's not narrowly focused on news.
Oh, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's not effectively a zero-sum game until you near saturation. Before that point, the dynamics are the same as for an infinite resource.
How's about a game of poker with grains of sand as chips?
Second, you already admitted that the amount of attention can grow. There's only a finite amount of wealth represented in the balance sheets of everyone alive on the planet right this second, but no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum Game because there's no clear upper bound.
A finite number is always finite, even if it's so large that you can't comprehend it in normal human terms.
Oh, and arguably the amount of fame there is to be had is nowhere near unfathomable. I can list off the top of my head probably hundreds of "famous people", and I don't give a shit about celebrity. The only limit there is my memory, not a lack of famous people to think about. Our culture is absolutely packed with famous people, it's pretty clearly saturated.
A finite number is always finite, even if it's so large that you can't comprehend it in normal human terms.
You apparently misunderstood the point I made in the gp post. That has almost nothing to do with my argument. So, you are saying that any game where the scores at any moment are finite numbers is a zero-sum game.
Various economic activities are subject to many iterations across time.
"no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum Game"
Objectively wrong.
Okay, not enough words for the slightly uninformed to understand. There are people historically who have put forth theories based on the idea that globally wealth is zero-sum. I don't think anyone in economics takes them seriously any more.
Our culture is absolutely packed with famous people, it's pretty clearly saturated.
The >culture< -- meaning I presume, the general culture -- are you so soft-headed that you think this directly relates to the context of getting hired in a particular field or this discussion?
Exercise for the less than completely clued -- where in the previous discussion did I frame the relevant context of notoriety. Locate that, and reframe your arguent in that context. Then I might consider this intellectually worthwhile. As it is, I keep on having to explain things to someone who half-understands arguments.
Actually, this says nothing. Context matters greatly. Who cares if the issue is getting hired for a geology job in Houston, but the population of Bollywood stars is exploding?
As he rightly points zero sum would mean that whenever something attracts our attention something else is losing its share to fame. But the 'axiom' that fame is a zero sum quantity is be now measurable way true. In some cases if something excite as that means that we will loose interest in something else. But this is not general true. And this is the beauty of new ideas. They can generate interest from zero.
In addition he did not say that fame is infinite so as to make your laughter justifiable. He just pointed and I agree with him that fame is not by default a zero sum thing
I don't think that's fair. Why is "be famous" a better decoding than "be awesome?" Are you seriously telling me that you know of no one who, while they don't have celebrity status, isn't known in your community or subfield as someone awesome?
there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game.
I'm calling bullsh#t on this one. How in the world can you justify there's a finite amount of fame? Fame is basically the garnering of attention. Are you implying there's a finite amount of attention? How is this so in the face of increasing population and wealth? Not only are there more people, more of the people have more free time and access to information resources. There's more and more people able to pay more and more attention. Even if this were not true, fame still wouldn't be a zero sum game unless you've shown that everyone's attention is saturated. I posit that there's still room for growth.