Corneille; Ambition aspires to descend
“A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune, and favor cannot satisfy him.” ― Jean de La Bruyère
Caesar; I would rather be the first man here than the second at rome.
Quintillian; though ambition is itself a vice, it is often the parent of virtues.
Jonson; It is a good thing to inflame the mind, and though ambition itself be a vice, it is often the cause of great virtue. Give me that wit whom praise excites, glory puts on, or disgrace grieves; he is to be nourished with ambition, pricked forward with honour, checked with reprehension, and never to be suspected of sloth.
Swift, thoughts on various subjects; Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture as creeping.
Seneca, epistle ad lucilium; Ambition so frenzied that you regard yourself last in the race if there is anyone in front of you.
La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 490; One often passes from love to ambition, but one rarely returns from ambition to love
Mam on glory
Specific achievement is good
Glory is rarer then any possible competition, so they’re always insufficient for glory
Is it in egalitarian to praise such risky hopes
Minimum criteria?
Men both vary more on more traits and shoot for high variance things BC evopsych/reproduction
How inches do you need to be with your ambition? E.g. producing the effect yourself vs difference making. Getting there first, but with what gap? E.g. Einstein. Also tradeoffs of impact vs. involvement with ambition. (Does ambition typically aim at achievements without these tradeoffs? E.g. being first to do x) (this actually opens onto a very general distinction of being some way vs doing sometthing I.e. producing effects).
Also the point about the choice being due to your own exceptionalness in some sense, not random chance or the benevolence of another. A determined hanger-on on around rich patrons (I.e. an unworthy Christian) doesn’t seem ambitious. Similarly a once off high variance roulette player is less ambitious than a routine pokies addict, because of the small sample size.
It seems ambition and glory are centrally co center with (deserving) recognition for some act, not just high variance counterfactual impact. I.e. theorems vs people continuum of callard.
What is the structure of these recognition-centric aims, being a productive cause of x must be a part of it. What about agentic vs involuntary self transformation?
Ambition as a goal vs instrumental heuristic vs as a description of an unaware actor.
If you’re aiming for glory thats general wet a domain then luck is fine, but if it’s particular then you can’t let luck impinge on the particular thing you’re coming for. Something about the instrumental vs final character of stuff idk.
The most ambitious people have the worst ambitions, and the people with the best ambitions are the least ambitious. Why?
Plausibly a lot of it is just Christian humility as a hangover. So people’s self-image as ethical sways against ambitious ethics. There’s also the stoic history, ambition lies against equanimity, which is in turn against an ideal of negative liberty, it makes you a slave to fortune. However it isn’t against an ideal of positive liberty as reason’s responsiveness, which may demand maximising EV. It’s against a certain zen anti-striving position too, whereby you already are, or have, everything of value in your Buddha-nature. Striving can only take you away from this.
Ambition without wisdom/knowledge of the good produces Stalins and hitlers.
Aristotle’s discussion of ambition as philotimia actually isn’t as relevant as his discussion of pride or magnanimity. Though he does note the mean lacks a name, and people call both the virtue and vice by the same name, praising and blaming using the same term. We seem to be in the same condition now.
In Homer, Achilles ambition, a short life and glory, is praised, in certain respects at least. The stoics were against ambition, Plato feared it in the political context, Aristotle was more neutral. The church fathers counter ambition as a species of avarice. In the federalist papers of madison, where ambition is recognised as inevitable, the idea of a balance of power, countering ambition with ambition is adopted instead. The open spaces, and comparison with natives, made America attract, and then reinforce the ambitious. (King, Ambition, A history, Introduction).
(The ancient Greeks had no exact equivalent of the word ambition. In an early example of its eternally discordant nature, ambition was expressed by the Greeks across three different terms: philotimia (“the love of honor”), eritheia (“rivalry” or “strife”), and philodoxia (“love of acclaim”). Hellenistic philosophers were divided in their views on “passions” like ambition. Aristotle and the Peripatetic school saw them as winds that moved human beings from inertia into action. In Latin - Ambitio = going around canvassing votes.
However, the Romans were acutely aware and wary of ambition’s duality. Cicero described ambition as a “malady,” albeit one that draws “the greatest souls” and “most brilliant geniuses.” Similarly, Quintilian wrote “Though ambition may be a fault in itself, it is often the mother of virtues.” Seneca’s Stoic view was more dogmatic, conjoining ambition with avarice and describing them both as outright “ills of the human soul.” Aurelius is a thorn in the stoic pcture of ambition
In the fourth century, as Rome began its catastrophic fall, Saint Ambrose described ambition as a pestis occulta (“hidden plague”). Thus began a shift toward a more rigid version of ambition, one not only devoid of nuance but also turned against the populace.
Up through the sixteenth century this rhetoric was rampant in Western culture. Homilies, stories, poetry, and ballads propagated an ideology that men were bound to their station, whether he was a king by God-given right or a lowly serf like his forbearers. A restless desire to divert from the status quo, to rise above the “estate” which “God hath geven or appoynted,” was akin to rebellion, not unlike Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God. It was an era of fixed mindsets, and ambition was implicitly and explicitly condemned. Not even Machiavelli, of all people, would try to save it — writing around the same time, he also vilified ambizione, coupling it with unsavory qualities like violence, corruption, and envy.
Elizabethan and Jacobean theater often featured ambitious anti-heroes subverting the natural order, rising above the prescribed limits of their birth, and leaving a trail of chaos in their wake. Fate tugs them back to earth like a cosmic reverse-bungee cord, and order - or some version of it - is once again restored. Macbeth, for example, succumbs to the siren call of ambition and becomes its slave, losing his humanity before his rival beheads him. On the Ides of March, the illustrious Caesar is betrayed and stabbed to death by his jealous companions. After a Machiavellian rise to power, the initially amusing King Richard III suffers a short, paranoid, chaotic reign before dying on the battlefield.
D’Allessandro - A brief history of ambition)
If ambition is aiming for the tail, then it’s the only sensible way to do heavy-tailed activities like gold-mining, and indeed the whole activity is ambitious in a sense.
The extreme form of altruistic ambition is Bankman-Fried saying he will play the St. Petersburg game on TC, matches with his other activities. How does this relate to welfare being non-additive? What about the harm-benefit asymmetry? These both seem risk-averse. What about suffering-focused ethics?
What did confucius think? He admired the sage kings, and had an extremely ambitious project himself, but discouraged it somewhat I feel. Recall him giving contradictory advice though.
Seems like there’s an ambition of aiming for the tail, but a different thing of already being in the tail, and merely not wanting to backslide. This points to the difference between ambition as a character trait, which concerns what is possible for you to achieve, that’s the relevant possibility distirbution, not the population-wide one. There’s also the fact that ambition runs counter to the naturalistic fallacy, if the natural is something like the mean, (or at least the mean of a myopically selected distribution re culture and time).
Weren’t Christians ambitious in a sense? the one gate is narrow and the other is wide after all, the desert fathers and mothers, plus other monastics, weren’t exactly modest goals in many senses, they aimed for one or the other tail of distributions afaict. Also Dante’s Paradiso is literally him moving further and further out in a distribution of heavenly spheres towards the empyrean. And what could be more heavy tailed than heaven and hell? Pascal’s wager is a perfect example of ambition, right? Not quite, ambition wants the achievement of a place in the heavy tail, not just getting there by divine grace. In this way it is self-centred. Though it may still be instrumentally valuable to a saint if ambition becomes a more tractable means as it has in our modern era of financial and social freedom.
Ambition is counter to the virtue of moderation or temperance.
It will also predictably lead to norm-violation, since acts are judged short-term, and ex-post. EAs try to get around this by rewarding ambitious failures. There’s also the fact that ambition is inherently longtermist, because of the scale of future impacts and audiences.
Also on things with diminishing marginal returns we shouldn’t be ambitious, which may be most things.
Artists, have always seemed quite ok with ambition, even when they credit it as doing glory to god, but even more so when they’re being secular and glorifying themselves like Michelangelo. Athletes are the ones who seem unusually not-generally ambitious. Is it because of something that makes the athlete more salient in our memory from just a few feats, so the most memorable athletes need not be the most ambitious? The same seems true of chess players. My hypothesis is in any domain with veyr legible hierarchies, like records and competitions, the most memorable people can achieve being memoral by excelling only a few times, while artists and politicians must always excel. There’s also the fact that athletes are young, while artists and scientists often aren’t. This means artists and scientists must sustain ambition longer than athletes to become famous.
Much of the ethical baggage discourages ethically-minded aspirants from being ambitious.
Maybe there’s also the fact that most of life is in the middle of distributions, most of the time. So unless you’re aiming at excelling at responding to these everyday reasons over a whole life, you’ll tend to neglect them, as the ambitious man does to his family. This also holds because ambition is future-focused, and so it is against gratitude in some sense, it always propels onwards, seeking further recognition but failing to recognise what he already has.
There’s also tall poppy syndrome, mocking the kill in !kung people
But missionaries were certainly ambitious, especially in the new world, the opening of a new vista excites our ambition. When we want to achieve the outermost point of some distribution, and are suddenly reminded of how far off it still lies, a certain conscience of dissatisfaction is excited in us, and spurs us to act.
Should you start ambitious and revise down? Kids certainly seem to start ambitious.
It’s plausible that many of the desires that manifest as ambition are vicious, like insecurity about one’s own ability, needing to continually re-test it, or in the intrinsic value of cardinal ranks. cardinal vs ordinal ambition is a good distinction, one can promote vice the other doesnt.
lack of risk aversion? Plausibly, if ambitious people assign all the value to the tail of achievement-distributions, like powerful optimisers do, they will sacrifice everything else in their lives, (setting them to random values). This is in fact what we see.
Counterfactual impact isn’t legible?
If ambition is a general personality trait, it will tend to manifest as acquiring convergent instrumental goods, like money and fungible status. But why not self-improvement? Maybe because of concerns about value change and identity?
Another possibility for why ambition is domain-general is because it’s often partly driven by an instrinsic desire for improvement. This will manifest as serial ambition for too-small goals, consider Schwarzenegger’s career for an example.
Why do monastic communities seem necessary in most cases for ethical ambition?
Was there a turnaround in the period of exploration/capitalism with greater social mobility.
Wanting to be the best, full stop, need not be very ambitious, if you only seek out small ponds.
(Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there’s a concentration of smart people there, but that there’s nothing else people there care about more. Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens — till they start hedge funds or startups respectively.
- Stuff about cardinal and ordinal ambitions are about positive vs zero sum status games?
Connection between cardinal/ordinal ambition and Positional goods
To be clear, if competing in (locally) zero-sum status games is externally high-status, then it can be positive-sum in a broader context
- This is not just saying status games can have positive externalities, it’s saying it can be beenficial for both parties in the game
Connection between Different types of progressivism, conservatism, and reactionism, and reactionary thought (clarify that these are the alien sociologists categories, not referring to the historical kinds of earth)
- which of these are cardinally vs. ordinally ambitious?
- extend this to which will lead to involution
Seems like involution also needs zero-sum status games, with only one hierarchy/saturated hierarchies. (Thick status markets?)
This suggests an answer to a question people in New York have wondered about since the Bubble: whether New York could grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley. One reason that’s unlikely is that someone starting a startup in New York would feel like a second class citizen. There’s already something else people in New York admire more.
Economic power, wealth, and social class are just names for the same thing at different stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth, and wealth to social class. So the focus of admiration is simply shifting upstream.
Certain activities like math and physics don’t seem to need cities so much, see Los Alamos, maybe because the judgement of your peers is all you need?
Paul Graham - Cities and Ambition)
Ambition sometimes tends to being arranged along a single either legible or fungible axis, like fame, money, power, who you know, ideas/authorship(?), acceptance into a certain social class, (Murdoch french satirist) etc. The alternative is niche but highly legible status hierarchies, like those produced by formal competition, e.g. anime, sports, etc.
what about mathematics or art? I guess artists are often ambitious, see their manifestoes. I’m not sure about mathematicians, they don’t seem to be looking forward so much as down on the problem they’re working on.
Icarus - hubris vs ambition?
Aristotle Rhetoric bk. 2 - Philotimia love of honour
Ambition (out August 25th)
An Essay on the Burning Desire to Rise
Eckart Goebel (Author), James C. Wagner (Translator)