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Ask HN: Is value subjective?

10 points by ParameterOne ↗ HN
I just want to get an idea of what the HN community thinks about this. Personally I think value is subjective. I would also add that I believe reality is also subjective due to the personal nature and perspective of the individual.

28 comments

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savethefuture
Value is generally subjective, especially when dealing with bartering or trading, but things such as currency, have agreed upon values.
savethefuture
And after you edited your question, if you want to bring reality into the mix, then yes, everything is created by yourself. You assign value or purpose or meaning to everything.
mkempe
No. Breathing is not "subjective". Shelter and food are not subjective values. Freedom is a necessity of living as a proper human being. It all relates to your standard of value. For humans, life under the guidance of reason, or range-of-the-moment emotionalism? for grass, growing with sun, water, and nutrients; or death in darkness, drought, or lack of CO2? etc.

As for reality being subjective -- do you look before crossing the road? when was the last time you jumped naked from the top of a skyscraper? would you enjoy a plate of plutonium for breakfast?

savethefuture
Just because you believe you can not, does not mean you can not. "Reality" is processed in our head, everything is/can be subjective if you so choose. If you choose to believe something else then its your choice again.
AnimalMuppet
So do you believe that you can do some of mkempe's examples? Do you believe it strongly enough to try to give us a demo?

If you really believe that you can, and you try, you're going to get a very painful demonstration that reality does not match your beliefs. And if you don't believe it enough to try, you're just shooting your mouth off.

savethefuture
You are way off topic, I never said I believed in random nonsense and that magic fairies exist. I said we interpret reality in our head and everything is subjective to our own reality.
ParameterOne
> It all relates to your standard of value.

My point exactly. Subjective.

AnimalMuppet
That wasn't mkempe's point at all. Either you missed it, or you're trying to put words in his/her mouth.

mkempe's point was that there are universal human values. There are universal values for plants, which are different from human values. The "relative" was relative to whether you are a human or a plant. For humans, mkempe was claiming that values are universal.

You can disagree with mkempe if you want. That's fine. But don't misrepresent his/her position.

ParameterOne
I did miss his point. Best I could tell he didn't have one. So to me his comment had zero value. Do you think it should be down voted because it has no value to me even though it may have value to you?
savethefuture
But value is subjective so he had a point, but you choose not to accept its value. ;)
dragonwriter
Value is sort of the defining example of subjectivity.
taprun
Imagine that you have two people with the exact same amount of money. One hasn't had any water in 3 days, the other just drank a gallon of water.

Do you think they'd place different values on a glass of water? Do you think they'd interpret the glass of water differently?

barongrounds
If the second person knew of the existence of the first, he could buy the glass of water and sell it to the first, pocketing any difference. Their perceived values should be similar.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
No, the perceived value wouldn't be similar. If the first person is about to die of dehydration and only the water can save him, he very likely would be willing to pay more / sacrifice more to get the water. The second person will match the price only up to a point. If he had to cut his finger off to pay for the water, he wouldn't do it. But the first person might, to save his life. They value the water differently.
dragonwriter
No, there should be an equilibrium market price in dollars thst they both pay if they are participants in a shared market. That doesn't mean the value to each is the same.

Of course, the fact that they have access to that shared market also changes the value to each of them from that in the original hypothetical.

barongrounds
I think we have a difference in vocabulary. I would say value and equilibrium market price refer to the same thing, but you are saying it is the particular use it has to the individual which is of course not quantifiable. Assuming the person who's had no water has access to a functioning market they will only pay market price. Arguing about them perceiving it to have a higher value seems like a pointless philosophical argument.
Red_Tarsius
Different people might assign different values to the same product, but everyone follows the same thought process. If you repeat your scenario x times, the thirsty individual is always going to value water more than the sated individual.
siegel
Are they placing different values on the glass of water? Or is that not the correct way to think about this? The person who hasn't had water in 3 days places a certain value on quenching his thirst and avoiding dehydration. If there were two items available to him (water and something else we can call X) that would serve that purpose, one would expect he would pay the same amount for both things. And the reason he would do so is because the thing he is valuing is avoiding dehydration and quenching thirst - not any particular tangible thing.

Let's say we call the person above A and the person who drank the gallon of water B. And let's say instead of a glass of water, A and B were offered a bottle of water. And before you make the offer, you tell B that he will be spending the next 3 days stranded in the desert. Now will he value the bottle of water the same as A?

From this perspective, back to your scenario, instead of looking at it as A and B valuing water differently, one could say they value avoiding dehydration the same. It's just that in the scenario, there's no dehydration for B to avoid.

hacknat
> From this perspective, back to your scenario, instead of looking at it as A and B valuing water differently, one could say they value avoiding dehydration the same. It's just that in the scenario, there's no dehydration for B to avoid.

How is this different than anything else? I'm not placing value on food, I'm placing value on eating. I'm not placing value on money, I'm placing value on the freedom it gives me. Literally every value judgement has to do with fulfilling a subjectively perceived need.

siegel
I'm challenging the idea that the scenario presented by the original poster in this thread shows that value is subjective. Maybe value is subjective, but i would need a different thought experiment to prove that.
bjourne
The dictionary definition of value is that it is subjective, isn't it? I believe it is. Worth, on the other hand, is objective. Value happens to be of Latin origin and worth of Germanic.
tmaly
I think value is totally subjective. Mises had this brilliant way to think about value in his book Human Action. Where you can use ranking or ordering of things to measure value.

On reality, I tend to think of it as some form of state machine, but this could very well be a leaky abstraction. We all start with a different set of inputs and experiences. How we view what we each call reality is largely shaped by these.

Red_Tarsius
Reality is objective. You can't pray cancer away and denying global warming doesn't make it disappear. Reality goes on with or without your consent. To some extent, physical actions can affect your environment.

The millenial narrative tells you that, eventually, reality will align with our best wishes. False. We must be ready to accept and deal with truths of any kind, no matter how ugly they are.

hacknat
I'm not sure how you're addressing the question. I don't think anyone would disagree with you that reality is "objective". Our perception of it is far from objective though.
hacknat
> reality is also subjective

This is a big leap. While I agree that value is subjective, that doesn't make reality subjective. Reality is the medium through which our subjective experiences are negotiated. We are all more or less seeing and hearing the same events. Of course our interpretation of them can vary drastically, but that doesn't mean that what "actually" happened is different.

Can a human fully get at the "objective" truth? Probably not, but we can negotiate pretty close to it, and the more we all hammer away at the same thing to perceive what is going on with it, the more likely it is that our generalized observations are pretty close to what is "actually" happening.

Edit:

You can view our perceptions of reality as an evolutionary process. Those of us who have interpretations of reality that most closely align with "what is really happening" will probably survive more over the long run. There are, of course, exceptions, it seems like humans have defense mechanisms in memory that help survival, so a perfectly clear picture of reality can, sometimes, be detrimental to human health (especially mental health).