It’s hard to “explain the way that people associate varying degrees of status” when nearly everyone seems to mean something different by “status”. Plainly, I disagree that this “permits direct reasoning from evidence”.
This post argues that the kind of evidence we may find useful to reason from is “improbable outcomes that rank high in an agent’s preferences attest[ing] to that agent’s power”. If you can reliably get people to pay you large sums of money, or hop into bed with you, or carry out your orders, that is something worth explaining. (Though not all such explanations will necessarily be status-based.)
Similarly what makes the red paperclip story hard to argue with is that its protagonist ends up with a house at the end. That’s definitely an improbable outcome attesting to that person’s ability to do… something.
This post makes some testable predictions. It argues, for instance, that you do not get a house (or a customer to sign a large contract with you, etc.) by looking into someone’s eyes in a high-status way and hinting that you’d like a house (or that contract, etc.). It argues that such “high status behaviours” as they have been called in fact gain you nothing directly usable, but pave the way for further transactions.
It’s hard to “explain the way that people associate varying degrees of status” when nearly everyone seems to mean something different by “status”.
Well I think that part of the reason that status is interesting is that people do perceive it consistently—perhaps not in a way they can easily verbalize but surely if you asked a group of people to rank the status of a bunch of businessmen/athletes/janitors based on one photograph then their responses would correlate better than chance. Or if each person in a particular social group ranked the status of all the other members, etc.
I guess my point is that the interesting thing about status is the complicated procedure by which we perceive and act on it. That is, it’s interesting as a question about human psychology. The evidence should be the status perceptions that people make, and the question should be how and why they make them. Starting with “status=optimization power” leads to a different set of questions, which, while valid, are not the questions that people usually ask about status, and which I think miss the point.
if you asked a group of people to rank the status of a bunch of businessmen/athletes/janitors based on one photograph then their responses would correlate better than chance.
That’s an interesting experiment to suggest, let’s think it through carefully.
Suppose we took a set of photographs, each of a single person, in a similar pose, and we asked a random sample from a given demographic to rank these photographs.
Immediately one complication that arises is what question we’re asking. “Rank these people by status” is going to be interpreted differently by different people creating one more variable to control for: any correlation that arises could be a correlation in how people in our sample are likely to interpret the question.
Even supposing that complication could be somehow mitigated, there is the question of whether people are basing their rankings on some readily available characteristic other than status. It seems likely, for instance, that irrespective of the question asked people would perceive physical attractiveness (which is but one form of “influence power” as the post uses that notion) and rank the photographs according to that.
Intuitively, I wouldn’t necessarily expect that if you controlled for physical attractiveness, there would be anything left for people’s rankings to correlate on.
But the post is quite clear that physical attractiveness is not necessary to achieve what people would call “high status”, any more than starting out wealthy is the only possible way to acquire a house (we have an existence proof that you can do it with one red paperclip to start with).
a different set of questions, which, while valid, are not the questions that people usually ask about status, and which I think miss the point.
Perhaps it is “the questions that people usually ask about status” which miss the point.
It’s hard to “explain the way that people associate varying degrees of status” when nearly everyone seems to mean something different by “status”. Plainly, I disagree that this “permits direct reasoning from evidence”.
This post argues that the kind of evidence we may find useful to reason from is “improbable outcomes that rank high in an agent’s preferences attest[ing] to that agent’s power”. If you can reliably get people to pay you large sums of money, or hop into bed with you, or carry out your orders, that is something worth explaining. (Though not all such explanations will necessarily be status-based.)
Similarly what makes the red paperclip story hard to argue with is that its protagonist ends up with a house at the end. That’s definitely an improbable outcome attesting to that person’s ability to do… something.
This post makes some testable predictions. It argues, for instance, that you do not get a house (or a customer to sign a large contract with you, etc.) by looking into someone’s eyes in a high-status way and hinting that you’d like a house (or that contract, etc.). It argues that such “high status behaviours” as they have been called in fact gain you nothing directly usable, but pave the way for further transactions.
Well I think that part of the reason that status is interesting is that people do perceive it consistently—perhaps not in a way they can easily verbalize but surely if you asked a group of people to rank the status of a bunch of businessmen/athletes/janitors based on one photograph then their responses would correlate better than chance. Or if each person in a particular social group ranked the status of all the other members, etc.
I guess my point is that the interesting thing about status is the complicated procedure by which we perceive and act on it. That is, it’s interesting as a question about human psychology. The evidence should be the status perceptions that people make, and the question should be how and why they make them. Starting with “status=optimization power” leads to a different set of questions, which, while valid, are not the questions that people usually ask about status, and which I think miss the point.
That’s an interesting experiment to suggest, let’s think it through carefully.
Suppose we took a set of photographs, each of a single person, in a similar pose, and we asked a random sample from a given demographic to rank these photographs.
Immediately one complication that arises is what question we’re asking. “Rank these people by status” is going to be interpreted differently by different people creating one more variable to control for: any correlation that arises could be a correlation in how people in our sample are likely to interpret the question.
Even supposing that complication could be somehow mitigated, there is the question of whether people are basing their rankings on some readily available characteristic other than status. It seems likely, for instance, that irrespective of the question asked people would perceive physical attractiveness (which is but one form of “influence power” as the post uses that notion) and rank the photographs according to that.
Intuitively, I wouldn’t necessarily expect that if you controlled for physical attractiveness, there would be anything left for people’s rankings to correlate on.
But the post is quite clear that physical attractiveness is not necessary to achieve what people would call “high status”, any more than starting out wealthy is the only possible way to acquire a house (we have an existence proof that you can do it with one red paperclip to start with).
Perhaps it is “the questions that people usually ask about status” which miss the point.