Well, observation. If a person routinely acquires status even though it DOESN’T further any of their goals, they presumably value status as a terminal value. If someone only acquires status WHEN it’s instrumentally valuable, then it’s presumably not a terminal goal.
This seems slightly circular to me. For both of the observations to work, you’d already have to know some of the person’s terminal values. I believe this doesn’t get any easier even if you’re observing yourself.
For the other points, I appreciate your elaboration, but I was more like hoping to invoke the consideration that social status is a very fuzzy concept, and probably too high level to be optimized by evolution anyway. Once you invent the concept, then I guess you can shortcut some social computation… and get some cognitive biases as a side effect.
Status is fuzzy, but so is intelligence. Given that dominance and hierarchies are important to many primates, I’d consider the DEFAULT assumption to be that humans DO value all of that, and you’d need to present evidence that humans are somehow exceptional...
This seems slightly circular to me. For both of the observations to work, you’d already have to know some of the person’s terminal values. I believe this doesn’t get any easier even if you’re observing yourself.
For the other points, I appreciate your elaboration, but I was more like hoping to invoke the consideration that social status is a very fuzzy concept, and probably too high level to be optimized by evolution anyway. Once you invent the concept, then I guess you can shortcut some social computation… and get some cognitive biases as a side effect.
Status is fuzzy, but so is intelligence. Given that dominance and hierarchies are important to many primates, I’d consider the DEFAULT assumption to be that humans DO value all of that, and you’d need to present evidence that humans are somehow exceptional...