You’re right of course, but it couldn’t be helped. The premise of the main post under discussion is “human intelligence evolved so that we could outwit one another, and therefore status seeking is a terminal value for most humans”. There are so many evo-psych leaps in that sentence that I couldn’t figure out how to even approach the topic without making a few leaps of my own. Maybe that was the wrong way to go about it, but I would like to think that lesswrongers implicitly understand these caveats whenever evo-psych is discussed.
Admittedly, my real justification for not believing that status seeking is a terminal value has got nothing to do with evolution. It’s just that I know many people who behave in ways that would imply that status is not a high priority for them. Despite evolution not providing any positive evidence for my belief, I can see that my belief at the very least doesn’t clash with my model of how evolution works, so I just put the two together to illustrate this lack-of-clashing.
I suppose that this would border on what people here term “dark arts”, had I done this self consciously, since there was a discrepancy between the evidence which justified my belief and the arguments which I used to justified the claim.
The point I was trying to make (and should have stated more succinctly) is that the idea that intelligence arouse as part of runaway arms-race selection does not necessarily imply that humans must be very status seeking. Generating an alternative narrative to counter the proposed narrative was perhaps not the best method of getting that point across.
You’re right of course, but it couldn’t be helped. The premise of the main post under discussion is “human intelligence evolved so that we could outwit one another, and therefore status seeking is a terminal value for most humans”. There are so many evo-psych leaps in that sentence that I couldn’t figure out how to even approach the topic without making a few leaps of my own. Maybe that was the wrong way to go about it, but I would like to think that lesswrongers implicitly understand these caveats whenever evo-psych is discussed.
Admittedly, my real justification for not believing that status seeking is a terminal value has got nothing to do with evolution. It’s just that I know many people who behave in ways that would imply that status is not a high priority for them. Despite evolution not providing any positive evidence for my belief, I can see that my belief at the very least doesn’t clash with my model of how evolution works, so I just put the two together to illustrate this lack-of-clashing.
I suppose that this would border on what people here term “dark arts”, had I done this self consciously, since there was a discrepancy between the evidence which justified my belief and the arguments which I used to justified the claim.
The point I was trying to make (and should have stated more succinctly) is that the idea that intelligence arouse as part of runaway arms-race selection does not necessarily imply that humans must be very status seeking. Generating an alternative narrative to counter the proposed narrative was perhaps not the best method of getting that point across.