Order Of Values

I've been thinking about the true source of "being valuable" ever since GPT-3 came out a few years ago. (This might come as a surprise to some people, but me disapproving something doesn't imply that I will give no thoughts about it.) I do not have a working theory yet but I suppose I should tell you what I'm thinking right now.

  • The fundamental source of value, or at least one of the fundamental sources of value, comes in the form of the proof, the possibility or promise of the decrease of entropy of any specified local systems. To put it in another way, anything that's able to decrease entropy is fundamentally valuable. Example: Food. Water. Clothes. Bricks. Steel. Music. One can almost say, that the word "value" refers exactly to such decreases of entropy.
  • With this definition of value one can identify at least two tiers of them:
    • First-Order Value, which directly decreases the entropy of the symbiosis of human beings and the part of the world that composes their inhabitats.
    • Second-Order Value, which decreases the entropy of the system required to harvest first-order value.
  • With the definitions above one is thus able to observe the following patterns:
    • First-order value does not perish. Example: a piece of bread is a piece of bread no matter what you think.
    • Second-order value, however, can perish or become non-existent cleanly.
    • The development of second-order value would cause the decrease of the price of first-order value.
    • There's a fundamental upper limit of first-order value; there is only so much entropy one can decrease. The hope for the increase of such limit lies in related frontier research, e.g. material science.
    • The existence and increase of second-order value thoroughly relies on first-order value. If there are too many people that make their livings by providing second-order value and not enough people who provides first-order ones within a society, there will be societal crises. It's a fundamental flaw of how human society works the fact that both orders of values are measured and traded with the same unit, but I suppose any kind of "two-tier currency system" would lead to even more problems (e.g. currency exchange black markets) in practice.

A core life goal of mine after 2022 is that I should use the money I earned via generating second-order value for the activities that generates first-order value; at least it seems to me that it's much more desirable to live (sometimes even stupidly) a modest life but manage to wage a hundred-year bet against God by trying to build the next Yamaha or Honda than to become filthy rich via crypto and whatever the fuck people use to make quick money and waste it all on what people like to waste quick money on - mansions, cars, jewelries, etc.; I do consider the great manufacturing giants of Japan (especially Yamaha) to be one of the kinds of highest achievements you could establish as an entrepreneur. (Of course we always have Xerox PARC (and to a different degree, the RAND Corporation) to look up to, but I suppose barely anyone is willing to invest millions and wait decades just to create life-changing billions in this day and age…)

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Last update: 2026.3.28