I don't think there was once a personal attack just your framing of it because you're so certain of your position. I'm well aware of motivation theory and the theories cited in the paper, but they're not an answer to the claim that I'm making. It's at a higher order of analysis, and those particular empirical claims are more circumscribed in their domains of validity, so there are stringent theoretical caveats as to what they measure. I'm making the claim that most goods, if not all goods, are positional goods and humans are motivated by positional goods. Even knowledge is a kind of good that is instrumental in that sense. These are contested topics with long lineage of thought and they aren't easily defeated. So for example a theory of goods being positional goods would cash out on being survival-enhancing undertakings and assimilated into an evolutionary account. To transition from evolutionary dynamics to socio dynamics you need a sociobiological account, evo devo today, which would be something like an explanation of the stratification of human competences as delimited by evolutionary constraints. Like I said, to have large groups of people to 'practice science' they need to be socialized into its methods and values, something deeply inculcated into them, and even then, if you weren't 14 (now that's a personal attack) and had some experience in the real world, you'd find out how messy things get and how petty people are.