My gut response to the League of Rationalists is a resounding, “Fuck yeah!” but on reflection, my current models of status doesn’t predict it working.
You’ve identified a target of “reduce/eliminate the feeling of not having enough status”.
I’m going to be affected by all of the little non-verbal signals that emit from a person. A big part of my felt status seems to come from those. If I walk in to a room and everyone sneers at my, I’m more likely to feel like shit.
But as others have stated, “how many people actually have my back?” is likely the chunk of reality that status grounds itself in. Imagine the scenario where the people around you all send all the proper “You have status!” signals, but no one ever gets around to helping you when you need it. I’d predict that you might feel good at the beginning, but that soon enough you “status detectors” would wise up, and you’d start feeling low status again.
I’m pretty sure that any League one might make, you’d have to ensure that people actually unconditionally helped each other. That is a necessary (but maybe not sufficient?) condition. So the question is why are people going to help each other unconditionally? The proposed plan was to have some really strict high cost admittance process, such that all members will consider it a totally worthwhile to follow the decision rule “Unconditionally help all those in the League.”
Okay, now that I’ve put this all out in order, I guess I just find it crazy unlikely that you could find an admission process that fit that criteria. My first impression is that their are too many dissenting opinions among “the rationalists” for their to be an admission process that would satisfy more than a few people. Though I’d be super interested to hear any thoughts you’ve had about what this process might look like. I’ll give it some thought as well.
My gut response to the League of Rationalists is a resounding, “Fuck yeah!” but on reflection, my current models of status doesn’t predict it working.
You’ve identified a target of “reduce/eliminate the feeling of not having enough status”.
I’m going to be affected by all of the little non-verbal signals that emit from a person. A big part of my felt status seems to come from those. If I walk in to a room and everyone sneers at my, I’m more likely to feel like shit.
But as others have stated, “how many people actually have my back?” is likely the chunk of reality that status grounds itself in. Imagine the scenario where the people around you all send all the proper “You have status!” signals, but no one ever gets around to helping you when you need it. I’d predict that you might feel good at the beginning, but that soon enough you “status detectors” would wise up, and you’d start feeling low status again.
I’m pretty sure that any League one might make, you’d have to ensure that people actually unconditionally helped each other. That is a necessary (but maybe not sufficient?) condition. So the question is why are people going to help each other unconditionally? The proposed plan was to have some really strict high cost admittance process, such that all members will consider it a totally worthwhile to follow the decision rule “Unconditionally help all those in the League.”
Okay, now that I’ve put this all out in order, I guess I just find it crazy unlikely that you could find an admission process that fit that criteria. My first impression is that their are too many dissenting opinions among “the rationalists” for their to be an admission process that would satisfy more than a few people. Though I’d be super interested to hear any thoughts you’ve had about what this process might look like. I’ll give it some thought as well.