Maneuvering into a position of social power is an intrinsic, biologically-mediated goal for many humans (cf. the “Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis”). Thus, treating ‘status’ as an intrinsic rather than instrumental goal is a very common trap for humans to fall into, especially particularly clever humans (since ‘cleverness’ probably evolved primarily to serve precisely these purposes, and so the stimulus will activate those modules preferentially).
If locating truth in the search space is a preferable goal to gaining social status, then it might be worthwhile to taboo the word ‘status’ for awhile, especially on lesswrong—it seems to be collecting a lot of unfortunate cached subtext.
Also: be very careful asking questions like that, because they tend to signal low status if you ask them wrong. ;)
Sometimes I find that signaling low status is usefull. Sometimes I don’t intrinsically care about status and signaling low status is more instrumentally valuable. Sometimes I am low status and signal honestly.
And sometimes status is efficiently distributed and what is instrumentally useful to a tribe is also high status.
Maneuvering into a position of social power is an intrinsic, biologically-mediated goal for many humans (cf. the “Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis”). Thus, treating ‘status’ as an intrinsic rather than instrumental goal is a very common trap for humans to fall into, especially particularly clever humans (since ‘cleverness’ probably evolved primarily to serve precisely these purposes, and so the stimulus will activate those modules preferentially).
If locating truth in the search space is a preferable goal to gaining social status, then it might be worthwhile to taboo the word ‘status’ for awhile, especially on lesswrong—it seems to be collecting a lot of unfortunate cached subtext.
Also: be very careful asking questions like that, because they tend to signal low status if you ask them wrong. ;)
Sometimes I find that signaling low status is usefull. Sometimes I don’t intrinsically care about status and signaling low status is more instrumentally valuable. Sometimes I am low status and signal honestly.
And sometimes status is efficiently distributed and what is instrumentally useful to a tribe is also high status.