Surely if you go down to the nuts and bolts of it, you get a graph with a “willingness to help” function from People x People → R. And then you could break this down even further adding “Time” and “Modality” to the domain, and all that...
But what I’m interested in is increasing the feeling of status, or to be more precise, minimizing the felt lack of status. I do expect those variables to be a scalar. How reality maps to this scalar is an interesting question.
status is a side-effect (or maybe a cognitive summary) of much more complicated interpersonal feelings and habits.
I think it mostly boils down to a few simple acts that are all proxies of this “willingness to help” thing.
As a general principle, In altering the perception of Thing, I believe it’s best to just alter Thing. In our case that’s altering the actual willingness to help each other.
I don’t think this is all that much more likely for any individual to choose than your recommendation, but it has the advantage that it’s unilateral and doesn’t require anyone else to cooperate.
This looks like editing your utility function instead of satisfying it, which I think is a lot harder. Surely there is some low-hanging fruit in interpreting things differently to make yourself feel happier, but afaict we all learn this as kids and then we get stuck in the failure mode of assuming that it’s always about reinterpretation. That’s what happened to me, anyway.
But what I’m interested in is increasing the feeling of status, or to be more precise, minimizing the felt lack of status
Do you believe that felt lack of status is completely uncorrelated with others’ willingness to cooperate? I have to admit that I care about my own status a whole lot less than many seem to, but I can’t tell if this is just counter-signaling or a true reflection of the idea that status is complicated and intertwined with a lot of other real interpersonal relationship things, making it vary widely among individuals.
A more direct question about your model: would it be easier to just literally wirehead? Electricity to the part of the brain that seeks status?
Do you believe that felt lack of status is completely uncorrelated with others’ willingness to cooperate?
I think it’s strongly correlated, and causally bidirectional: higher status leads to better performance (for mental health reasons) leads to higher status.
The way I see it is that high status is the baseline condition and lack of status is a malfunctioning that makes one function below their capacity. In the same way that having to go to the toilet does.
would it be easier to just literally wirehead? Electricity to the part of the brain that seeks status?
If we could, yes. How many years until it’s commercially available?
Surely if you go down to the nuts and bolts of it, you get a graph with a “willingness to help” function from People x People → R. And then you could break this down even further adding “Time” and “Modality” to the domain, and all that...
But what I’m interested in is increasing the feeling of status, or to be more precise, minimizing the felt lack of status. I do expect those variables to be a scalar. How reality maps to this scalar is an interesting question.
I think it mostly boils down to a few simple acts that are all proxies of this “willingness to help” thing.
As a general principle, In altering the perception of Thing, I believe it’s best to just alter Thing. In our case that’s altering the actual willingness to help each other.
This looks like editing your utility function instead of satisfying it, which I think is a lot harder. Surely there is some low-hanging fruit in interpreting things differently to make yourself feel happier, but afaict we all learn this as kids and then we get stuck in the failure mode of assuming that it’s always about reinterpretation. That’s what happened to me, anyway.
Do you believe that felt lack of status is completely uncorrelated with others’ willingness to cooperate? I have to admit that I care about my own status a whole lot less than many seem to, but I can’t tell if this is just counter-signaling or a true reflection of the idea that status is complicated and intertwined with a lot of other real interpersonal relationship things, making it vary widely among individuals.
A more direct question about your model: would it be easier to just literally wirehead? Electricity to the part of the brain that seeks status?
I think it’s strongly correlated, and causally bidirectional: higher status leads to better performance (for mental health reasons) leads to higher status.
The way I see it is that high status is the baseline condition and lack of status is a malfunctioning that makes one function below their capacity. In the same way that having to go to the toilet does.
If we could, yes. How many years until it’s commercially available?