I don’t consider our definitions exclusive—I consider mine to be an unpacking of the general one that explains what it actually means. “What is status?” “Your social position” seems like answering the teacher’s password—it doesn’t tell me what to actually predict yet. “What is social position?”, “Your ability to ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” gives me actual information to work with.
Social position occurs within governments (where status determines your ability to influence large section of a country) but also within small social circles (i.e. Queen Bee or Alpha Male status determines your ability to shape the course of conversations, influence the opinions of your group, decide what clothes are fashionable, etc). Telling good jokes is a legitimate way to gain status in social circles large and small.
Now, if the ONLY other thing that can shape the course of conversations, group opinions, or clothing fashionability was other people, then yes, that type of status would be zero sum. You wouldn’t be able to gain control of it without someone else losing control of it. But that is not the only factor at work. Clothing fashionability is impacted by the weather. One alpha can’t necessarily influence a large group to wear skimpy clothes during a snowstorm, but a collection of people who each have influence might be able to.
In the desert island case, building fires and shelters are hard work. In the scenario where everyone tells good jokes, each person doesn’t have any greater ability to influence the others against each OTHER, but they do all have the ability to influence the others against lethargy, hunger, or other factors.
If you want to unpack “social position”, “relative ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” is a much more plausible candidate.
You wrote:
You can define status as “how much more ability to be treated favorably you have compared to other people,” but I don’t think that’s a useful definition. The word “status” has gain popularity particularly because it flexibly describes a wide array of social interactions.
You don’t think it is a useful definition? (!) I could see an argument being made that it is less useful than ‘absolute ability to be treated favorably’ but how is it not useful at all? Even if it is more useful (and I’m not at all convinced a concept becomes more useful because it is broader) is that a reason to use it despite it straightforwardly contradicting the meaning usual English word (see all the instances of ‘rank’ and ‘relative’ in the above definitions). I guess this has become a definition debate which is obviously silly but as far as I can tell your definition just doesn’t match the way the word is used at all.
If you want to unpack “social position”, “relative ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” is a much more plausible candidate.
Given two perfect strangers in a post apocalyptic scenario, and two perfect strangers who soon realize they are both high ranking members of their respective tribes, I think the latter group will show more respect for each other, even though they have no one else to compare themselves to. (I will note that this is an empirical prediction which might be false. Anyone know if data exists on this?)
You don’t think it is a useful definition? (!) I could see an argument being made that it is less useful than ‘absolute ability to be treated favorably’ but how is it not useful at all?
I mostly agree with this, and should have worded it that way.
I think we need a word for each of these concepts. I’m not picky about which word gets used to mean what. But I still don’t think it’s automatically implied that status is relative by the traditional definition (“position” can be on an absolute or relative scale) but the word status gets used on Less Wrong in enough contexts that for our purposes, it’s probably more useful as the broader term.
Edit: Using status as the broad term also saves us the trouble of coming up with a new word, since we just say “relative status” whenever we mean that, and if we’re in a discussion that’s obviously about relative status it can probably be abbreviated anyway.
Given two perfect strangers in a post apocalyptic scenario, and two perfect strangers who soon realize they are both high ranking members of their respective tribes, I think the latter group will show more respect for each other, even though they have no one else to compare themselves to.
The strangers have more social power to mistreat the other without repercussions than the chiefs have.
I think we need a word for each of these concepts.
Disentangle ability to be treated favorably from relative social position. If every one of some nations has nuclear weapons sufficient for a MAD policy, we can expect them to not mistreat each other too harshly. If this is a post-apocalyptic scenario and each such nation was populated by robots and one human, in a meeting of the humans none would be necessarily be high status, but severe social harm would not be inflictable.
In a group of thousands of otherwise equal sadists with locked-in syndrome in which each could activate a shock collar on a random other sadist with their eyes, one wouldn’t say they are all low status.
That is really a grim hypothetical and I hope to think of a better one.
Also, I didn’t say that all status was absolute. Relative status definitely exists, and contributes more directly to the ability to mistreatment. I was simply disagreeing with the idea that status is relative all the time, either by definition or by example.
“Your ability to ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” gives me actual information to work with.
This ignores the unpleasant aspects: your ability to mistreat other people in your tribe, and your ability to not be mistreated. If one person gains the ability to be favorably treated, others are losing the ability to mistreat.
I think it still applies. I suspect that the two strangers who both start with some mutual respect would both tolerate slightly more rudeness than the ones without.
I don’t consider our definitions exclusive—I consider mine to be an unpacking of the general one that explains what it actually means. “What is status?” “Your social position” seems like answering the teacher’s password—it doesn’t tell me what to actually predict yet. “What is social position?”, “Your ability to ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” gives me actual information to work with.
Social position occurs within governments (where status determines your ability to influence large section of a country) but also within small social circles (i.e. Queen Bee or Alpha Male status determines your ability to shape the course of conversations, influence the opinions of your group, decide what clothes are fashionable, etc). Telling good jokes is a legitimate way to gain status in social circles large and small.
Now, if the ONLY other thing that can shape the course of conversations, group opinions, or clothing fashionability was other people, then yes, that type of status would be zero sum. You wouldn’t be able to gain control of it without someone else losing control of it. But that is not the only factor at work. Clothing fashionability is impacted by the weather. One alpha can’t necessarily influence a large group to wear skimpy clothes during a snowstorm, but a collection of people who each have influence might be able to.
In the desert island case, building fires and shelters are hard work. In the scenario where everyone tells good jokes, each person doesn’t have any greater ability to influence the others against each OTHER, but they do all have the ability to influence the others against lethargy, hunger, or other factors.
If you want to unpack “social position”, “relative ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” is a much more plausible candidate.
You wrote:
You don’t think it is a useful definition? (!) I could see an argument being made that it is less useful than ‘absolute ability to be treated favorably’ but how is it not useful at all? Even if it is more useful (and I’m not at all convinced a concept becomes more useful because it is broader) is that a reason to use it despite it straightforwardly contradicting the meaning usual English word (see all the instances of ‘rank’ and ‘relative’ in the above definitions). I guess this has become a definition debate which is obviously silly but as far as I can tell your definition just doesn’t match the way the word is used at all.
Given two perfect strangers in a post apocalyptic scenario, and two perfect strangers who soon realize they are both high ranking members of their respective tribes, I think the latter group will show more respect for each other, even though they have no one else to compare themselves to. (I will note that this is an empirical prediction which might be false. Anyone know if data exists on this?)
I mostly agree with this, and should have worded it that way.
I think we need a word for each of these concepts. I’m not picky about which word gets used to mean what. But I still don’t think it’s automatically implied that status is relative by the traditional definition (“position” can be on an absolute or relative scale) but the word status gets used on Less Wrong in enough contexts that for our purposes, it’s probably more useful as the broader term.
Edit: Using status as the broad term also saves us the trouble of coming up with a new word, since we just say “relative status” whenever we mean that, and if we’re in a discussion that’s obviously about relative status it can probably be abbreviated anyway.
The strangers have more social power to mistreat the other without repercussions than the chiefs have.
Disentangle ability to be treated favorably from relative social position. If every one of some nations has nuclear weapons sufficient for a MAD policy, we can expect them to not mistreat each other too harshly. If this is a post-apocalyptic scenario and each such nation was populated by robots and one human, in a meeting of the humans none would be necessarily be high status, but severe social harm would not be inflictable.
In a group of thousands of otherwise equal sadists with locked-in syndrome in which each could activate a shock collar on a random other sadist with their eyes, one wouldn’t say they are all low status.
That is really a grim hypothetical and I hope to think of a better one.
Also, I didn’t say that all status was absolute. Relative status definitely exists, and contributes more directly to the ability to mistreatment. I was simply disagreeing with the idea that status is relative all the time, either by definition or by example.
This ignores the unpleasant aspects: your ability to mistreat other people in your tribe, and your ability to not be mistreated. If one person gains the ability to be favorably treated, others are losing the ability to mistreat.
I think it still applies. I suspect that the two strangers who both start with some mutual respect would both tolerate slightly more rudeness than the ones without.