For instance, Wikipedia has a “social status” entry which defines it as “the honor or prestige attached to one’s position in society”.
That does not entail any particular behavior, so more narrowly I’d be interested in an authoritative source for what you call “high status behavior”. It seems to me that the list above contains items that have contextual interpretations: for instance, “flamboyant clothing” could be worn in the presence of a dictator, if you are, say, an entertainer.
Your assumptions about some of these items could be cultural: a Google search turned up the suggestion that “in many Middle Eastern cultures, intense eye contact [...] especially between men can mean I am telling you the truth”. Another example is the way you sit, with some cultural conventions strongly interpreting what others find trivial, such as sitting with the soles of your shoes showing.
(The same Google search is starting to suggest that the primary source for this list of supposed “high status behaviors” is Keith Johnstone’s 1979 book on improvisational theatre. Robin Hanson refers to the book. I’m also pretty sure I remember coming across a link to a gloss on this book while browsing an earlier conversation about “status” on LessWrong.)
(ETA: what I’m really interested in is teasing apart the concepts variously used here of “having high/low status”, versus “behavioral cues to one’s self-assessment of high/low status”, versus “game theoretic signalling” whereby one’s behavioral cues are less than fully honest as to one’s self-assessment. I’m unable to find these concepts pinned down with enough precision that I can reliably tell the difference between me being confused about them and other people being confused.)
This is a reply to you chain of concerns about status, not this comment in particular:
I like that you’re pushing for more rigor—in nearly every case that is a good thing. Your concerns do need to be addressed. But I’m a little confused about why the concept is so foreign to you. Status isn’t merely this theoretical concept used to explain behavior. At least for me it is a constant, pre-theoretical feature of social life. We should have a deep, well-defined theory of status but I don’t think we need to to say a lot of meaningful things about it. I believe I’m an authoritative source on the status signals of the groups I’m a part of (and some universal signals) in the same way I’m an authoritative source on the English language—it is a cultural practice I’m embedded in. I literally grew up with it (didn’t you have popular and unpopular kids in grade school?) You’re right that the status values for just about any behavior are highly dependent on context… it just the same way meaning can be in language. This is why it is often easy for someone from a different culture to screw up. Moreover, more subtle signals can often be read differently by different people (just as there is ambiguity in pragmatics).
I’m a little confused about why the concept is so foreign to you.
It hasn’t felt foreign before. It’s more like the recent posts about it, added to the comments on LW before that, have made me wake up to a confusion that was there before. Part of that is understandable, as LW is the first community I’ve come across where the notion is invoked that much.
Previously, my immediate association for the word “status” used to be in the sense of “project status”. In my professional community, referring to the term in its social acceptation was a daring excursion: for instance when I or a colleague observed that “a project status report is often about status, yes—the project manager’s status”. When I used it that way, I had a rather narrow sense in mind, specifically, the perceived position of someone in a group’s pecking order.
The LW discussions seem to invoke a much more general and pervasive meaning, which is what I’m coming to question; specifically because the “status” concept here seems to be used here to explain everything. Which is precisely what this site has been teaching me to see as a red flag.
I have my own everyday-life observations about status (for instance, a status hypothesis about schools and universities) that intersect with the topic of rationality, and that I might explore in a post sooner or later, but I have to pin down the concept first.
Perhaps this is just a “clack” on my part. I’d appreciate being pointed to any evidence of that.
For instance, Wikipedia has a “social status” entry which defines it as “the honor or prestige attached to one’s position in society”.
That does not entail any particular behavior, so more narrowly I’d be interested in an authoritative source for what you call “high status behavior”. It seems to me that the list above contains items that have contextual interpretations: for instance, “flamboyant clothing” could be worn in the presence of a dictator, if you are, say, an entertainer.
Your assumptions about some of these items could be cultural: a Google search turned up the suggestion that “in many Middle Eastern cultures, intense eye contact [...] especially between men can mean I am telling you the truth”. Another example is the way you sit, with some cultural conventions strongly interpreting what others find trivial, such as sitting with the soles of your shoes showing.
(The same Google search is starting to suggest that the primary source for this list of supposed “high status behaviors” is Keith Johnstone’s 1979 book on improvisational theatre. Robin Hanson refers to the book. I’m also pretty sure I remember coming across a link to a gloss on this book while browsing an earlier conversation about “status” on LessWrong.)
(ETA: what I’m really interested in is teasing apart the concepts variously used here of “having high/low status”, versus “behavioral cues to one’s self-assessment of high/low status”, versus “game theoretic signalling” whereby one’s behavioral cues are less than fully honest as to one’s self-assessment. I’m unable to find these concepts pinned down with enough precision that I can reliably tell the difference between me being confused about them and other people being confused.)
This is a reply to you chain of concerns about status, not this comment in particular:
I like that you’re pushing for more rigor—in nearly every case that is a good thing. Your concerns do need to be addressed. But I’m a little confused about why the concept is so foreign to you. Status isn’t merely this theoretical concept used to explain behavior. At least for me it is a constant, pre-theoretical feature of social life. We should have a deep, well-defined theory of status but I don’t think we need to to say a lot of meaningful things about it. I believe I’m an authoritative source on the status signals of the groups I’m a part of (and some universal signals) in the same way I’m an authoritative source on the English language—it is a cultural practice I’m embedded in. I literally grew up with it (didn’t you have popular and unpopular kids in grade school?) You’re right that the status values for just about any behavior are highly dependent on context… it just the same way meaning can be in language. This is why it is often easy for someone from a different culture to screw up. Moreover, more subtle signals can often be read differently by different people (just as there is ambiguity in pragmatics).
It hasn’t felt foreign before. It’s more like the recent posts about it, added to the comments on LW before that, have made me wake up to a confusion that was there before. Part of that is understandable, as LW is the first community I’ve come across where the notion is invoked that much.
Previously, my immediate association for the word “status” used to be in the sense of “project status”. In my professional community, referring to the term in its social acceptation was a daring excursion: for instance when I or a colleague observed that “a project status report is often about status, yes—the project manager’s status”. When I used it that way, I had a rather narrow sense in mind, specifically, the perceived position of someone in a group’s pecking order.
The LW discussions seem to invoke a much more general and pervasive meaning, which is what I’m coming to question; specifically because the “status” concept here seems to be used here to explain everything. Which is precisely what this site has been teaching me to see as a red flag.
I have my own everyday-life observations about status (for instance, a status hypothesis about schools and universities) that intersect with the topic of rationality, and that I might explore in a post sooner or later, but I have to pin down the concept first.
Perhaps this is just a “clack” on my part. I’d appreciate being pointed to any evidence of that.
No, I think you’re right in that it’s not being rigorously defined or used appropriately in some of the recent articles.
I agree, the abuse of the term has made me cringe at times.