I liked Part 2 as well, but wish it covered more of the “status universe”. Ideas for future posts (things that I wish I understood better):
how wealth/income relate to status
old money vs new money
how does status signaling / status symbols work
why do people choose certain things as status symbols
why are some people willing to pay such a heavy cost to obtain status symbols? how/why does this differ by culture?
how does civilization channel people’s desire for social status into “productive” ends (like increasing a nation’s economic capacity and military power, or making intellectual progress)?
can we design better institutions for doing this through explicit understanding of status?
given that people seem to care a lot about status symbols / positional goods, what implications does that have on AI alignment?
philosophy and intellectual progress in general (including AI alignment/safety) as a status game
if AI alignment were to succeed, how does that affect humans’ status games / social interactions? what will human interactions look like afterwards?
Similar to the discussion in The Nature of Offense (Wei Dai, 2009), if someone wants and expects to lead more than the other person is allowing, the first person may describe themselves as “offended”, and describe the other person as “rude”.
Hmm, I think offense is more about status (“a tacit shared understanding of how much someone can lead without getting pushback”) than how much someone is leading or following in a particular interaction. People tend to take offense when their status is threatened, even if they’re not directly interacting with the person offending them, for example taking offense when you hear someone talk trash about you (or even your country, culture, etc.) behind your back. And we can view someone not following you as much as you want/expect as a special case of this, because the other person is implying through their actions that they don’t think your status is as high as you think.
There’s actually a meta-status problem with any group discussion of status, namely that if the group members judge it to have a below average chance of winning a status competition, in whatever sphere of activity they are engaged in, then its members have incentives to block or ignore the discussion.
Or even downplay the group itself, its quality, etc…, if they can’t prevent the discussion, much like hunting groups for meat. This especially applies for group members who perceive themselves to be in the most marginal, low status, cohort.
The core reason is nobody wants to be known as a 100% guaranteed loser, so anyone who already has below average prospects is going to feel extremely sensitive about even the slightest chance of the group losing future status competitions and thus dragging them down even further.
Although this doesn’t apply to the most valuable group members, who presumably view themselves as having above average status, the opposite problem occurs, namely that actually winning a status competition might attract people who are above them into joining, and thus diluting their own influence, or even worse, relegating them to the second tier. (this doesn’t apply if the group is already at the very highest level)
So paradoxically only the ‘middle-class’ members reliably do anything more than empty talking, at least for status constrained issues. Literally everyone else has incentives to talk a big game but also prevent anything decisive.
I liked Part 2 as well, but wish it covered more of the “status universe”. Ideas for future posts (things that I wish I understood better):
how wealth/income relate to status
old money vs new money
how does status signaling / status symbols work
why do people choose certain things as status symbols
why are some people willing to pay such a heavy cost to obtain status symbols? how/why does this differ by culture?
how does civilization channel people’s desire for social status into “productive” ends (like increasing a nation’s economic capacity and military power, or making intellectual progress)?
can we design better institutions for doing this through explicit understanding of status?
given that people seem to care a lot about status symbols / positional goods, what implications does that have on AI alignment?
morality as a status game and how that affects alignment/safety
philosophy and intellectual progress in general (including AI alignment/safety) as a status game
if AI alignment were to succeed, how does that affect humans’ status games / social interactions? what will human interactions look like afterwards?
Hmm, I think offense is more about status (“a tacit shared understanding of how much someone can lead without getting pushback”) than how much someone is leading or following in a particular interaction. People tend to take offense when their status is threatened, even if they’re not directly interacting with the person offending them, for example taking offense when you hear someone talk trash about you (or even your country, culture, etc.) behind your back. And we can view someone not following you as much as you want/expect as a special case of this, because the other person is implying through their actions that they don’t think your status is as high as you think.
There’s actually a meta-status problem with any group discussion of status, namely that if the group members judge it to have a below average chance of winning a status competition, in whatever sphere of activity they are engaged in, then its members have incentives to block or ignore the discussion.
Or even downplay the group itself, its quality, etc…, if they can’t prevent the discussion, much like hunting groups for meat. This especially applies for group members who perceive themselves to be in the most marginal, low status, cohort.
The core reason is nobody wants to be known as a 100% guaranteed loser, so anyone who already has below average prospects is going to feel extremely sensitive about even the slightest chance of the group losing future status competitions and thus dragging them down even further.
Although this doesn’t apply to the most valuable group members, who presumably view themselves as having above average status, the opposite problem occurs, namely that actually winning a status competition might attract people who are above them into joining, and thus diluting their own influence, or even worse, relegating them to the second tier. (this doesn’t apply if the group is already at the very highest level)
So paradoxically only the ‘middle-class’ members reliably do anything more than empty talking, at least for status constrained issues. Literally everyone else has incentives to talk a big game but also prevent anything decisive.