Reading this post and comments was almost physically painful to me. Offense is a solved problem. Why are we still discussing it? Are we going to have a free will debate next week? Though I understand that people may get offended at the thought that their feelings of offense are how a status-seeking algorithm feels from inside, and all the “deeper” reasons coming to mind are just post hoc rationalizations. It must feel like trivializing the rainbow...
And perhaps the same goes for any explainer… that is, if it turns out that the “this is what it feels like to be a status-management algorithm” explanation for offense wasn’t original with LW, perhaps it wouldn’t matter, because it’s equally dismissive to assume that anyone solved it.
But surely there has to be a limit to that, doesn’t there? Problems, including millenia-old problems, do eventually get solved.
So I guess my question is: why is it clear that this one isn’t solved via an understanding of social status and the mechanisms for attacking and defending it? What’s left over?
In my opinion, one reason why many people tend to dislike status-based explanations is that these explanations have unpleasant implications because of the fixed-sum nature of status. Status may not be precisely a fixed-sum good, but that does seem to be a very good approximation. Therefore, if the status of a certain individual or group is raised, that usually means that someone else’s status has been lowered as result, and the change that produced this rise in status must have come at someone else’s expense.
It follows that the advocates of some status-altering social change cannot accurately present it as an unalloyed good and a win-win situation for everyone; it is always analogous to redistribution of wealth, rather than everyone becoming richer. Of course, the former is a tougher sell, and makes for a much less convincing case.
Well, of course a lot depends on how much energy and resources are being expended on maintaining the status differential in the first place, and how much opportunity cost is reflected in it, and how many players the world contains.
That is, if we work for the same company and I’m your manager, and I am spending half my time trying to keep you down and you spend half your time trying to sabotage me, a status-altering social change that rendered us peers might turn out to raise both of our statuses relative to other groups, as well as make both of our lives easier and more enjoyable.
But, yes, I agree with you that many people who resist status-altering social changes are thinking in fixed-sum terms.
There are actually two issues there: the distribution of the status itself, and the cost in other goods and resources expended in pursuing and maintaining it. An arms race in pursuing status (e.g. by expensive signaling, or by costly efforts to keep others down) is indeed a problem of collective action that leads to awful negative-sum games, and a social change that prevents this arms race may be beneficial for everyone if it leads to a similar status distribution, only without the cost. But in contrast, it’s unclear whether a Pareto-improvement in status itself is possible.
In the boss-employee example, the change may benefit both parties by eliminating the negative-sum game in which they’re stuck. It may also benefit everyone else by a tiny amount by making the economy slightly more productive. But if both the boss and the worker raise their status in the society at large as a result, that will come at the expense of others’ status—even if it means an infinitesimal reduction of status for each person in a great mass of people who are now below each of them in the status hierarchy, rather than a large reduction for some clearly identifiable party. (It’s roughly analogous to how successfully passing a small amount of perfectly forged money represents an infinitesimal taking from everyone else by making their money slightly less valuable.)
The relevance of that link isn’t lost on me, but it’s not obvious to me that lukeprog’s question is equivalent to “why does objectification offend people?”
Riding my cruelty hobby-horse a little more: I think that I find cruelty offensive. I’m open to a status-seeking explanation for that but it seems likely to me that more is going on.
The relevance of that link isn’t lost on me, but it’s not obvious to me that lukeprog’s question is equivalent to “why does objectification offend people?”
I think you can get on fine just knowing the answer to the question “how to tell if something will offend someone?”, and avoid cluttering your mind with irrelevant stuff like “objectification” and “the criterion of violability”.
Well, the status hypothesis easily explains why the Playboy photo will displease many women in a way the mud photo won’t. Do you have any other puzzling questions?
Well, the status hypothesis easily explains why the Playboy photo will displease many women in a way the mud photo won’t.
It gives an answer, but it doesn’t necessarily give complete answer, or at least not a complete answer in relation to the reference class ‘feminists’.
Lowered status is not just bad in and of itself. It also has other effects—making a certain reference class be considered less desirable for certain jobs or social positions, making a certain reference class be less likely to have their complaints or observations taken seriously, making it more likely that a certain reference class will not have their rights upheld or their needs taken into account when laws are passed, and so on. Feminists and other activists—at least the ones that I’m aware of—tend to focus much more on those kinds of issues, some of which are life-threatening, than on the simple emotional discomfort of being offended.
I know very well that status isn’t about “simple emotional discomfort”! Did anyone ever say that it was? Status is up there with money and health among the most important stats of every human being, a huge factor in pretty much everything. Which makes it an even better idea to “follow the money” or “follow the status” whenever you see two parties arguing over something that doesn’t look like a factual issue. Even when you yourself are one of the parties.
The comment I replied to doesn’t make that clear, and can fairly easily be interpreted as ‘they’re just complaining because they feel offended; there’s no reason to take them seriously, it’s just status’. That’s not the only possible interpretation, obviously, but it’s the one I was speaking to. I’m glad that it’s not what you intended.
(Sorry for deleting my previous reply, it missed the mark.)
I wasn’t trying to answer the question “why is objectification wrong”, but rather “why do many people think objectification is wrong?” I think offense is a big part of the answer to the latter. See Righting a Wrong Question. This trick seems to be be especially useful with moral questions, e.g. “why is it wrong to kill” leads to making up stuff like unalienable rights, while “why do people think it’s wrong to kill” leads to evolutionary psychology and other issues that at least have the potential of becoming scientific.
Agreed with this as far as it goes, but I think it can go further.
A real understanding of the status issues involved does more than answer “will people be offended by objectification?” It also answers “does objectification harm people?”
This isn’t a moral question. That is, whether it’s wrong to harm people or not, and in what ways and under what circumstances it’s wrong, is a different question.
A real understanding of the status issues involved does more than answer “will people be offended by objectification?” It also answers “does objectification harm people?”
Yes! Thanks a lot for pointing this out, it makes the picture even more complete.
No, but statements like “X will show such-and-such reaction to Y” are observer-independent, while statements like “X should do Y” are observer-dependent. I enjoy LW more when it sticks to the former kind. I hope to never see the day when the “Wrong” in “Less Wrong” shifts its meaning to “morally wrong according to a certain theory of right and wrong”. Of course others may not necessarily share my taste for talking about true/false instead of good/bad, but talking about true/false also seems to be more useful and less fallacy-laden.
Doesn’t it seem likely that the algorithm for determining whether something will offend someone will contain a reference to objectification or something related to it pretty closely?
Just because you can conceptually draw a larger box around something doesn’t mean it hasn’t got parts.
Doesn’t it seem likely that the algorithm for determining whether something will offend someone will contain a reference to objectification or something related to it pretty closely?
Such an algorithm probably wouldn’t work for people from past epochs, who had a concept of offense quite similar to ours, but didn’t have a concept of objectification. And it wouldn’t work very well even today in my home country (Russia). Linking offense to status seems more robust to me.
I might have been understating it: it sounds funny to say “what’s left over when you take away status” when I meant to express skepticism that status had much at all to do with the bad evaluation of cruelty.
I was trying to point out an abstract bad thing that doesn’t seem to be political or coalitional, and therefore not so related to status-seeking. Cruelty seems to be such a thing, much more so than objectification. That I think it’s accurate to say that instances of cruelty “offend” me then seems to contradict the thesis that offense is all about status. Maybe this is a semantic problem and you could say that I find cruelty to be horrible not offensive, or something like that.
Yes, I agree that there’s a semantic problem here… specifically, as you say, the problem of understatement.
The planet Jupiter is, in fact, larger than a duck… but saying so is a strange linguistic act because there are so many more important things you could have said instead. Cruelty is, in fact, offensive—but more importantly, it has net negative consequences.
And status actually turns out to be a fairly useful way to talk about the consequences of cruelty (over and above the consequences of equal amounts of non-cruel suffering).
Cruelty is, in fact, offensive—but more importantly, it has net negative consequences.
The status explanation doesn’t leave as much room for a similar statement about objectification—in fact it explicitly disclaims that there’s a more important aspect of objectification than its offensiveness. I think this is what’s at stake for a lot of the comments here that defend the concept and reproach of objectification.
And status actually turns out to be a fairly useful way to talk about the consequences of cruelty (over and above the consequences of equal amounts of non-cruel suffering).
If I see what you’re getting at I disagree. For instance it’s not usually possible to lower an animal’s status, but cruelty to animals is deeply upsetting for me.
I agree with you that this notion that status is something unimportant—that it’s all about “high school popularity contests and all that sort of thing” (to quote Skatche) -- underlies a lot of the discussion so far.
And as I said here, I think this is simply wrong… unwarrantedly dismissive of the real effects of status. Low status gets people killed.
As for animals, yes, we disagree: I would say that an animal being treated cruelly is in a lower-status position, one in which it has less ability to effect its preferences, than one being treated kindly.
I wouldn’t say “solved problem” for something so convoluted, and it’s worth discussing roughly-understood things to refine the understanding, but I agree that that particular way of parsing the issue has lots of explanatory power.
Reading this post and comments was almost physically painful to me. Offense is a solved problem. Why are we still discussing it? Are we going to have a free will debate next week? Though I understand that people may get offended at the thought that their feelings of offense are how a status-seeking algorithm feels from inside, and all the “deeper” reasons coming to mind are just post hoc rationalizations. It must feel like trivializing the rainbow...
What is almost physically painful to me is declaring problems “solved” when they clearly aren’t.
To say the LW provided finished solutions to millennia-old problems would be treating millennia too lightly.
Perhaps.
And perhaps the same goes for any explainer… that is, if it turns out that the “this is what it feels like to be a status-management algorithm” explanation for offense wasn’t original with LW, perhaps it wouldn’t matter, because it’s equally dismissive to assume that anyone solved it.
But surely there has to be a limit to that, doesn’t there? Problems, including millenia-old problems, do eventually get solved.
So I guess my question is: why is it clear that this one isn’t solved via an understanding of social status and the mechanisms for attacking and defending it? What’s left over?
In my opinion, one reason why many people tend to dislike status-based explanations is that these explanations have unpleasant implications because of the fixed-sum nature of status. Status may not be precisely a fixed-sum good, but that does seem to be a very good approximation. Therefore, if the status of a certain individual or group is raised, that usually means that someone else’s status has been lowered as result, and the change that produced this rise in status must have come at someone else’s expense.
It follows that the advocates of some status-altering social change cannot accurately present it as an unalloyed good and a win-win situation for everyone; it is always analogous to redistribution of wealth, rather than everyone becoming richer. Of course, the former is a tougher sell, and makes for a much less convincing case.
Well, of course a lot depends on how much energy and resources are being expended on maintaining the status differential in the first place, and how much opportunity cost is reflected in it, and how many players the world contains.
That is, if we work for the same company and I’m your manager, and I am spending half my time trying to keep you down and you spend half your time trying to sabotage me, a status-altering social change that rendered us peers might turn out to raise both of our statuses relative to other groups, as well as make both of our lives easier and more enjoyable.
But, yes, I agree with you that many people who resist status-altering social changes are thinking in fixed-sum terms.
There are actually two issues there: the distribution of the status itself, and the cost in other goods and resources expended in pursuing and maintaining it. An arms race in pursuing status (e.g. by expensive signaling, or by costly efforts to keep others down) is indeed a problem of collective action that leads to awful negative-sum games, and a social change that prevents this arms race may be beneficial for everyone if it leads to a similar status distribution, only without the cost. But in contrast, it’s unclear whether a Pareto-improvement in status itself is possible.
In the boss-employee example, the change may benefit both parties by eliminating the negative-sum game in which they’re stuck. It may also benefit everyone else by a tiny amount by making the economy slightly more productive. But if both the boss and the worker raise their status in the society at large as a result, that will come at the expense of others’ status—even if it means an infinitesimal reduction of status for each person in a great mass of people who are now below each of them in the status hierarchy, rather than a large reduction for some clearly identifiable party. (It’s roughly analogous to how successfully passing a small amount of perfectly forged money represents an infinitesimal taking from everyone else by making their money slightly less valuable.)
The relevance of that link isn’t lost on me, but it’s not obvious to me that lukeprog’s question is equivalent to “why does objectification offend people?”
Riding my cruelty hobby-horse a little more: I think that I find cruelty offensive. I’m open to a status-seeking explanation for that but it seems likely to me that more is going on.
I think you can get on fine just knowing the answer to the question “how to tell if something will offend someone?”, and avoid cluttering your mind with irrelevant stuff like “objectification” and “the criterion of violability”.
cousin_it,
Apparently, lots of people think objectification is relevant. I’m asking “Why?”
And no, I’m not asking about offense.
Well, the status hypothesis easily explains why the Playboy photo will displease many women in a way the mud photo won’t. Do you have any other puzzling questions?
It gives an answer, but it doesn’t necessarily give complete answer, or at least not a complete answer in relation to the reference class ‘feminists’.
Lowered status is not just bad in and of itself. It also has other effects—making a certain reference class be considered less desirable for certain jobs or social positions, making a certain reference class be less likely to have their complaints or observations taken seriously, making it more likely that a certain reference class will not have their rights upheld or their needs taken into account when laws are passed, and so on. Feminists and other activists—at least the ones that I’m aware of—tend to focus much more on those kinds of issues, some of which are life-threatening, than on the simple emotional discomfort of being offended.
I know very well that status isn’t about “simple emotional discomfort”! Did anyone ever say that it was? Status is up there with money and health among the most important stats of every human being, a huge factor in pretty much everything. Which makes it an even better idea to “follow the money” or “follow the status” whenever you see two parties arguing over something that doesn’t look like a factual issue. Even when you yourself are one of the parties.
The comment I replied to doesn’t make that clear, and can fairly easily be interpreted as ‘they’re just complaining because they feel offended; there’s no reason to take them seriously, it’s just status’. That’s not the only possible interpretation, obviously, but it’s the one I was speaking to. I’m glad that it’s not what you intended.
Do you think that accurate predictions of people’s behavior is most of what’s required from a theory of right and wrong?
(Sorry for deleting my previous reply, it missed the mark.)
I wasn’t trying to answer the question “why is objectification wrong”, but rather “why do many people think objectification is wrong?” I think offense is a big part of the answer to the latter. See Righting a Wrong Question. This trick seems to be be especially useful with moral questions, e.g. “why is it wrong to kill” leads to making up stuff like unalienable rights, while “why do people think it’s wrong to kill” leads to evolutionary psychology and other issues that at least have the potential of becoming scientific.
Agreed with this as far as it goes, but I think it can go further.
A real understanding of the status issues involved does more than answer “will people be offended by objectification?” It also answers “does objectification harm people?”
This isn’t a moral question. That is, whether it’s wrong to harm people or not, and in what ways and under what circumstances it’s wrong, is a different question.
Yes! Thanks a lot for pointing this out, it makes the picture even more complete.
No, but statements like “X will show such-and-such reaction to Y” are observer-independent, while statements like “X should do Y” are observer-dependent. I enjoy LW more when it sticks to the former kind. I hope to never see the day when the “Wrong” in “Less Wrong” shifts its meaning to “morally wrong according to a certain theory of right and wrong”. Of course others may not necessarily share my taste for talking about true/false instead of good/bad, but talking about true/false also seems to be more useful and less fallacy-laden.
Doesn’t it seem likely that the algorithm for determining whether something will offend someone will contain a reference to objectification or something related to it pretty closely?
Just because you can conceptually draw a larger box around something doesn’t mean it hasn’t got parts.
Such an algorithm probably wouldn’t work for people from past epochs, who had a concept of offense quite similar to ours, but didn’t have a concept of objectification. And it wouldn’t work very well even today in my home country (Russia). Linking offense to status seems more robust to me.
To clarify, when A is cruel to B and C observes it (maybe not directly) who is being offensive to who?
A to C
Same question as to lucidfox above: can you say more about what you think the “more” is? What’s left over?
I might have been understating it: it sounds funny to say “what’s left over when you take away status” when I meant to express skepticism that status had much at all to do with the bad evaluation of cruelty.
I was trying to point out an abstract bad thing that doesn’t seem to be political or coalitional, and therefore not so related to status-seeking. Cruelty seems to be such a thing, much more so than objectification. That I think it’s accurate to say that instances of cruelty “offend” me then seems to contradict the thesis that offense is all about status. Maybe this is a semantic problem and you could say that I find cruelty to be horrible not offensive, or something like that.
Yes, I agree that there’s a semantic problem here… specifically, as you say, the problem of understatement.
The planet Jupiter is, in fact, larger than a duck… but saying so is a strange linguistic act because there are so many more important things you could have said instead. Cruelty is, in fact, offensive—but more importantly, it has net negative consequences.
And status actually turns out to be a fairly useful way to talk about the consequences of cruelty (over and above the consequences of equal amounts of non-cruel suffering).
The status explanation doesn’t leave as much room for a similar statement about objectification—in fact it explicitly disclaims that there’s a more important aspect of objectification than its offensiveness. I think this is what’s at stake for a lot of the comments here that defend the concept and reproach of objectification.
If I see what you’re getting at I disagree. For instance it’s not usually possible to lower an animal’s status, but cruelty to animals is deeply upsetting for me.
I agree with you that this notion that status is something unimportant—that it’s all about “high school popularity contests and all that sort of thing” (to quote Skatche) -- underlies a lot of the discussion so far.
And as I said here, I think this is simply wrong… unwarrantedly dismissive of the real effects of status. Low status gets people killed.
As for animals, yes, we disagree: I would say that an animal being treated cruelly is in a lower-status position, one in which it has less ability to effect its preferences, than one being treated kindly.
I wouldn’t say “solved problem” for something so convoluted, and it’s worth discussing roughly-understood things to refine the understanding, but I agree that that particular way of parsing the issue has lots of explanatory power.
Yes, but future discussions should at least reference past discussions if they were considered fruitful.