Though there is great ethical value in helping people avoid influence techniques, I contend that there is also great ethical value in teaching people how to influence others. I argue that social skills (of which social influence is a subset) are distributed inequitably in society, and that this result is unjust. Some people are dramatically better at social influence (status, etc...) than others knowingly or unknowingly, due to different personality traits and upbringings. There are the haves, and the have-nots in the area of social skills.
The only way for social equality to exist is for people to be in the same bracket of social skills (and social influence ability). We can’t make things equal, but we can compress the disparity between the top and the bottom, so the people at the bottom aren’t getting stomped on so badly.
Either the haves must give up their social skills, or the have-nots must attain more social skills. The first solution is impossible. With their higher social status, the haves can’t be forced to do so, and they will scoff at requests to disarm out of the goodness of their hearts. The cool kids aren’t going to change how they do things no matter how much the uncool kids stamp their feet. Furthermore, some of the haves are naturally that way due to their phenotype, and they can’t lower their social skills (at least, not without the help of the Handicapper General ).
The solution is for the have-nots to learn to be more socially influential. Yet if you do so, you join the ranks of the haves, though you may be one of their more restrained and reflective members. Unfortunately, if you become one of the haves you will still encounter have-nots. You should avoid stomping on them, but they may end up at a disadvantage relative to you. It isn’t your fault that they aren’t educated about social influence, and it isn’t your individual responsibility to do so.
A society where disparities in social skills have been compressed by pulling people at the bottom upwards would be more equal than what we have today. Reducing this inequality is a good thing. There would be great transparency about social influence. That’s part of the reason I write so much about these subjects: I’m trying to do my part to get the knowledge more evenly distributed. Yet there is a strange agreement in society between the haves and the have-nots: they both often look down on have-nots trying to become haves.
I also believe that there should be more discussion of the ethics of social influence. Yet in discussions of the ethics of social influence, I often notice a greater degree of scrutiny on people who are learning social influence, rather than on those who are already doing it. Furthermore, some ethical criticisms of social influence (usually leveled at those learning it) seem overly idealistic. When social influence and status is woven so deeply into the fabric of society, the phrase “don’t hate the player; hate the game” can often be a valid defense.
I see learning status gaining skills as an arms race. That is you gaining more social influence will encourage others to gain more to try and stay ahead of you so that they can get what they want. Thus forcing you to spend more time and energy on socialising. It is not as simple as have and have-nots.
I’d guess the haves socially denigrating the have-nots for trying to get more social skills is part of their way of fending off competitors.
Why the have-nots might do it? Well if they are part of your social group there are a number of reasons.
They might not want to be on their guard around you in case you try and manipulate them.
They might worry that you will become less interesting to talk to or less of a friend as you spend less time with your head in a book/consuming in-group media and more time shmoozing and climbing the greasy pole.
If they are not part of your social group, then yep a legitimate bias unless they are trying to defuse the arms race. Which is a bit overly idealistic I’ll grant you.
It might be a game, and engaging in it might lead to more energy put into socially unproductive purpose down the line. But, unfortunately, the only way to win IS to play, otherwise you’ll be losing influence to suburban WASPS with nice hair. Some of them might even be sociopaths. :(
Yes and no. If you personally want to be influential in government or CEO of a major company then yes. However that is not the only way to influence society.
There are two rough ways to shape society. Through social means and technological. An example of technological shaping is the creation of effective birth control allowed many women to take more control of their lives. It allowed them to have sex and maintain a career. Artificial wombs would have further societal consequences.
So if you are going the technological route to societal influence then all you need is sufficient resources to create the technology and market it to sufficient people such that it becomes self-sustaining. It would become self-sustaining by becoming the basis of a profitable business with lobbyists etc. If you are fulfilling a large need, then all you may need to do is develop the tech and license the patent. That may not require to much resources or lots of social skills. However the fallout of any technology is not predictable and it is very hard to “undo” a technological release if it is not to your liking (requiring lots of social influence).
In terms of long lasting social influence you can support a group that has the same or similar goals as you. The groups marketing team can then use their skills to transform your money into influence more effectively than the individual donator.
If your idea is insufficiently popular to be a major influence in that fashion it is likely if you get into politics that mentioning it or suggesting might well be political suicide.
Lone genius inventors have influence in society, but they don’t have much status. I don’t even know the name of the guy who invented birth control. It’s the marketers and CEOs in the technology sphere who get most of the status, outside of the geek world.
To truly capitalize on many inventions, it’s necessary to negotiate with your licensees, investors, or partners. How much social skills that takes depends on how well you want to come out in your negotiations. Business social skills aren’t the same thing as the status skills present in more general contexts, but there is substantial overlap.
Personally, I want to have my cake and eat it, too: I want to influence society, and gain status for it rather than creating things that give other people more status than me.
Not everyone shares a preference for attaining status, but many people share preferences for things that status can facilitate, such as money, dates, friends, and mental health. Those who can attain those things to their satisfaction without any additional efforts spent on status, are in a great spot. Those who can’t will have to either learn status, be unsatisfied, or downgrade their preferences to what they can achieve. While not everyone shares my preferences, it’s possible that more people should if they want to effectively fulfill their preferences.
I encourage people to be honest with themselves about what their goals actually are, instead of selling themselves short and accepting a mediocre situation out of fear of leaving their comfort zones. I make this encouragement because in the past I’ve observed many people (myself included) abandoning ambitions out of feelings of resignation and unworthiness, and convincing themselves that they don’t really want those things as a coping mechanism. This can be a dangerous form of self-deception.
But you accept that there are some people with genuinely low ambition? Whether I am one or not* is somewhat irrelevant; you probably don’t have sufficient biographical material to tell one way or another. Do you have a good way of testing whether low ambition is due to low ambition or low self-worth? Any research on the subject?
*I’d characterise mysefl as ambitious in what I would like to achieve, but I actively do not want the trappings of power. The thought of sycophantic yes-men vieing for my attention turns my stomach and makes me feel tired, for example. As do girls that would want to try and exploit me for my money/connectedness. So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
Whether I am one or not* is somewhat irrelevant; you probably don’t have sufficient biographical material to tell one way or another.
Of course, which is why I addressed my comment in general terms.
Do you have a good way of testing whether low ambition is due to low ambition or low self-worth? Any research on the subject?
I would expect individuals to vary on ambition and status-seeking. I do not know the precise factors that cause variance in these traits. I am advocating attention to specific factors that lead people to state low ambition or low desire/concern for status. These factors may include defeatism, lack of opportunity, discourage from others, negative emotion associations, akrasia, or past mistreatment or abuse.
*I’d characterise mysefl as ambitious in what I would like to achieve, but I actively do not want the trappings of power. The thought of sycophantic yes-men vieing for my attention turns my stomach and makes me feel tired, for example. As do girls that would want to try and exploit me for my money/connectedness. So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
Your view of status interaction seems different from mine. Having status doesn’t mean you have to have sycophantic yes-men. People (men or women) drawn to you for your money or connectedness (especially the latter) aren’t necessarily trying to exploit you.
So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
I guess it’s a question of costs vs. benefits and what your goals are. For most sorts of goals that people have, I suggest that status will probably help them achieve their goals to a similar degree that money could (think of the term “social capital”). I’ve noticed that people without much social experience, particularly with status interaction, often have an overly cynical outsider’s view of those sorts of interaction, which could lead to skewed estimate of costs and benefits.
Personally, I’ve found that many specific ways of acquiring social status or influence, even if not actively unethical, don’t fit my values or personality. Yet I feel a lot more comfortable rejecting them having tried them out, knowing that my arguments against them are based on empirical data, not on purely theoretical conceptions that may be subject to bias (e.g. self-deception, sour graps, slave morality).
You are worried about hypothetical people that say they are happy with their current social status when they really are not.
I’m worried about the truely less social being harangued to try and make them change themselves when they really don’t want to.
Until you recognise there is this group and include them in your plans for social change in some fashion (even if it is only identify and leave alone), then you are just making their lives more difficult (in a well meaning fashion).
Your view of status interaction seems different from mine. Having status doesn’t mean you have to have sycophantic yes-men. People (men or women) drawn to you for your money or connectedness (especially the latter) aren’t necessarily trying to exploit you.
I never said you have to have them or that all of them will be, merely if you are a top flight CEO or politician they will be drawn to you compared to if you are a bum. Thieves don’t steal from paupers. I’m an Agreeable guy and would not want to have to be saying no to them or be rude to them. And being on my guard against them would cramp my style as well.
My current social setting where I have a lot of help that I can provide and enjoy providing, I am sort out by people that try and curry my favour (E.g. by saying things I am interested in are interesting when they don’t understand them). Also people try to talk to me to be my friend, which annoys me when I am wanting to do something else. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind social interaction, I would just prefer it to be non-verbal, humourous, about a plan they have or based on shared intellectual interests.
Normally what they talk to me is about worries about the course and bitching. This I find I have nothing to add to really or interest in. Which probably colours my social interactions.
You are worried about hypothetical people that say they are happy with their current social status when they really are not.
Yes. Or when they want things that higher social status can help them achieve, which they don’t realize or are in denial about.
To make an analogy again to money, there are lots of people who say that they don’t care much about money, or don’t like the process of making money, but who want things (e.g. possessions, getting out of debt, donating to charities, or whatever), that can most efficiently be achieved through having more money than they currently have. For instance, let’s say we have someone who is in $10,000 credit card debt, who would love to donate to SIAI, but who says that he isn’t very concerned with money. At face value at least, something isn’t matching up.
What I encourage is for such people to (a) do some soul-searching about what their actual goals are, (b) be realistic about what means it will take to achieve those goals, and (c) attempt to avoid bias in an evaluation of the costs and benefits of those means.
I would want my example person to assess the value of paying off his debt and donating to SIAI, and what he is going to need to do to achieve those goals. Making some money is not the only way to achieve them, but it is one of the most direct ways. As a result, I would encourage an analysis of the costs and benefits of seeking more money, vs. other means for achieving his goals.
If he can find other ways to achieve his goals, then great! What I’m just skeptical of is people sitting around with goals, and rejecting viable means for achieving those goals out of a biased and uninformed assessment of those means. I am also skeptical of people abandoning goals too early and then rationalizing that they don’t really want those things.
I’m worried about the truely less social being harangued to try and make them change themselves when they really don’t want to.
I am not worried about people being encouraged to avoid self-deception about their goals, and avoid bias in their cost-benefit analyses of the means for those goals. I feel that people who don’t need such encouragement will easily shrug it off, and the cost of misplaced advice to them will be low. Yet for people who need such encouragement, the cost of not receiving it is potentially quite high.
Of course, I want to encourage people to engage in that sort of scrutiny in ways that doesn’t make them feel “harangued.” Yet right now on LessWrong, my primary goal isn’t to be maximally persuasive to particular people; it’s to discuss the problem at a more abstract level. Once I understand the scope and prevalence of these particular sorts of problems better, and how to recognize when people might be falling prey to them, I will have a better sense of if/how I should attempt to persuade people to change their thinking.
Until you recognise there is this group and include them in your plans for social change in some fashion (even if it is only identify and leave alone), then you are just making their lives more difficult (in a well meaning fashion).
I do recognize this group:
Not everyone shares a preference for attaining status, but many people share preferences for things that status can facilitate, such as money, dates, friends, and mental health. Those who can attain those things to their satisfaction without any additional efforts spent on status, are in a great spot.
I have no objection to people deciding that there is higher marginal benefit in devoting their next unit of effort towards something other than social skills/status/influence. I just advocate that this decision be based on a minimally-biased analysis of the nature of social interaction, and of the costs and benefits of developing in those areas.
Unfortunately, people who are relatively unsocialized and inexperienced in status interaction often seem to have certain biases about how social interaction works, which are difficult to fix without more social experience (see pjeby’s excellent post about the differences in perception of social interaction between “cats” and “dogs”).
In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attractiveness, social skills, and social status, according to their own values. The marginal benefit of putting in a small amount of effort is pretty high for people who are initially deficient in those areas. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit, such as making small tweaks to body language and posture, wearing clothes that fit properly, doing something with one’s hair, and avoiding putting oneself down or overly apologizing for things.
Normally what they talk to me is about worries about the course and bitching. This I find I have nothing to add to really or interest in. Which probably colours my social interactions.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
It is not just that. I get annoyed and tune out when anyone bitches and moans. Even people I like otherwise. Especially when they are trying to create ingroup outgroup divisions due to bruised egos (or at least that is how I interpret it).
In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attractiveness, social skills, and social status, according to their own values.
Mating is the social arena where a modest improvement can pay off (if you are going for the monogamy route). A slight improvement might also work if the dating scene is not very competitive where you are. But if we are in the hyper competitive era where only the very attractive men get all the girls, then it won’t work very well. It is also the least likely arena for you to get hangers-on or require you to do unethical actions to get ahead, so from this point of view good for geeks.
So I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with this. Improving the ability of geeks to work in business and politics I think would get more push back due to ethics such as anti-advertising, truth-telling and simply having to spend a long time to get any good at it due to its competitive nature.
This is reminding me of Westerfeld’s Uglies, a pretty good science fiction novel about a society where everyone gets plastic surgery at age 16 to make them extremely beautiful.
As might be expected in a novel, there’s an arbitrarily added catch to the beauty, but would just having the surgery be standard be a bad idea?
The novel was inspired by Raphael Carter’s “”‘Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation’ by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin”″, a short story which explores the implication of people having the option of not noticing whether people are beautiful or not.
It does seem like there are tree options to reduce beauty-based inequalities:
Make less beautiful people more beautiful (which may indeed involve routine surgery in the future).
Make the beautiful people less beautiful (e.g. the Handicapper General).
Make people care about beauty less (feasible in the future, but only partially effective in the present since so much of perceptions of beauty seem biologically predisposed).
I support #1 in the present, and some combination of #1 and #3 in the future, when we have more effective ways of changing people’s preferences.
It might also be possible in future to mimic the effect of options 1 and 2 by altering one’s own perception of who is beautiful and who isn’t. (For example, instead of handicapping beautiful people, I could get my brain reprogrammed to see as ugly the people others see as beautiful.) This is like #3 in that it’s about altering someone other than the beautiful/non-beautiful people themselves, but different in that one changes what one sees as beautiful instead of how much one cares about beauty.
Though there is great ethical value in helping people avoid influence techniques, I contend that there is also great ethical value in teaching people how to influence others. I argue that social skills (of which social influence is a subset) are distributed inequitably in society, and that this result is unjust. Some people are dramatically better at social influence (status, etc...) than others knowingly or unknowingly, due to different personality traits and upbringings. There are the haves, and the have-nots in the area of social skills.
The only way for social equality to exist is for people to be in the same bracket of social skills (and social influence ability). We can’t make things equal, but we can compress the disparity between the top and the bottom, so the people at the bottom aren’t getting stomped on so badly.
Either the haves must give up their social skills, or the have-nots must attain more social skills. The first solution is impossible. With their higher social status, the haves can’t be forced to do so, and they will scoff at requests to disarm out of the goodness of their hearts. The cool kids aren’t going to change how they do things no matter how much the uncool kids stamp their feet. Furthermore, some of the haves are naturally that way due to their phenotype, and they can’t lower their social skills (at least, not without the help of the Handicapper General ).
The solution is for the have-nots to learn to be more socially influential. Yet if you do so, you join the ranks of the haves, though you may be one of their more restrained and reflective members. Unfortunately, if you become one of the haves you will still encounter have-nots. You should avoid stomping on them, but they may end up at a disadvantage relative to you. It isn’t your fault that they aren’t educated about social influence, and it isn’t your individual responsibility to do so.
A society where disparities in social skills have been compressed by pulling people at the bottom upwards would be more equal than what we have today. Reducing this inequality is a good thing. There would be great transparency about social influence. That’s part of the reason I write so much about these subjects: I’m trying to do my part to get the knowledge more evenly distributed. Yet there is a strange agreement in society between the haves and the have-nots: they both often look down on have-nots trying to become haves.
I also believe that there should be more discussion of the ethics of social influence. Yet in discussions of the ethics of social influence, I often notice a greater degree of scrutiny on people who are learning social influence, rather than on those who are already doing it. Furthermore, some ethical criticisms of social influence (usually leveled at those learning it) seem overly idealistic. When social influence and status is woven so deeply into the fabric of society, the phrase “don’t hate the player; hate the game” can often be a valid defense.
I see learning status gaining skills as an arms race. That is you gaining more social influence will encourage others to gain more to try and stay ahead of you so that they can get what they want. Thus forcing you to spend more time and energy on socialising. It is not as simple as have and have-nots.
I’d guess the haves socially denigrating the have-nots for trying to get more social skills is part of their way of fending off competitors.
Why the have-nots might do it? Well if they are part of your social group there are a number of reasons.
They might not want to be on their guard around you in case you try and manipulate them.
They might worry that you will become less interesting to talk to or less of a friend as you spend less time with your head in a book/consuming in-group media and more time shmoozing and climbing the greasy pole.
If they are not part of your social group, then yep a legitimate bias unless they are trying to defuse the arms race. Which is a bit overly idealistic I’ll grant you.
It might be a game, and engaging in it might lead to more energy put into socially unproductive purpose down the line. But, unfortunately, the only way to win IS to play, otherwise you’ll be losing influence to suburban WASPS with nice hair. Some of them might even be sociopaths. :(
Yes and no. If you personally want to be influential in government or CEO of a major company then yes. However that is not the only way to influence society.
There are two rough ways to shape society. Through social means and technological. An example of technological shaping is the creation of effective birth control allowed many women to take more control of their lives. It allowed them to have sex and maintain a career. Artificial wombs would have further societal consequences.
So if you are going the technological route to societal influence then all you need is sufficient resources to create the technology and market it to sufficient people such that it becomes self-sustaining. It would become self-sustaining by becoming the basis of a profitable business with lobbyists etc. If you are fulfilling a large need, then all you may need to do is develop the tech and license the patent. That may not require to much resources or lots of social skills. However the fallout of any technology is not predictable and it is very hard to “undo” a technological release if it is not to your liking (requiring lots of social influence).
In terms of long lasting social influence you can support a group that has the same or similar goals as you. The groups marketing team can then use their skills to transform your money into influence more effectively than the individual donator.
If your idea is insufficiently popular to be a major influence in that fashion it is likely if you get into politics that mentioning it or suggesting might well be political suicide.
Lone genius inventors have influence in society, but they don’t have much status. I don’t even know the name of the guy who invented birth control. It’s the marketers and CEOs in the technology sphere who get most of the status, outside of the geek world.
To truly capitalize on many inventions, it’s necessary to negotiate with your licensees, investors, or partners. How much social skills that takes depends on how well you want to come out in your negotiations. Business social skills aren’t the same thing as the status skills present in more general contexts, but there is substantial overlap.
Personally, I want to have my cake and eat it, too: I want to influence society, and gain status for it rather than creating things that give other people more status than me.
That is fine, but a personal preference. And not one everyone shares.
My pleasures in life (so far) are simpler and easier to acquire than being high status.
Not everyone shares a preference for attaining status, but many people share preferences for things that status can facilitate, such as money, dates, friends, and mental health. Those who can attain those things to their satisfaction without any additional efforts spent on status, are in a great spot. Those who can’t will have to either learn status, be unsatisfied, or downgrade their preferences to what they can achieve. While not everyone shares my preferences, it’s possible that more people should if they want to effectively fulfill their preferences.
I encourage people to be honest with themselves about what their goals actually are, instead of selling themselves short and accepting a mediocre situation out of fear of leaving their comfort zones. I make this encouragement because in the past I’ve observed many people (myself included) abandoning ambitions out of feelings of resignation and unworthiness, and convincing themselves that they don’t really want those things as a coping mechanism. This can be a dangerous form of self-deception.
But you accept that there are some people with genuinely low ambition? Whether I am one or not* is somewhat irrelevant; you probably don’t have sufficient biographical material to tell one way or another. Do you have a good way of testing whether low ambition is due to low ambition or low self-worth? Any research on the subject?
*I’d characterise mysefl as ambitious in what I would like to achieve, but I actively do not want the trappings of power. The thought of sycophantic yes-men vieing for my attention turns my stomach and makes me feel tired, for example. As do girls that would want to try and exploit me for my money/connectedness. So I’ll try and find alternate ways to achieve my goals without acquiring great social status, as that would be a true win for me.
Of course, which is why I addressed my comment in general terms.
I would expect individuals to vary on ambition and status-seeking. I do not know the precise factors that cause variance in these traits. I am advocating attention to specific factors that lead people to state low ambition or low desire/concern for status. These factors may include defeatism, lack of opportunity, discourage from others, negative emotion associations, akrasia, or past mistreatment or abuse.
Your view of status interaction seems different from mine. Having status doesn’t mean you have to have sycophantic yes-men. People (men or women) drawn to you for your money or connectedness (especially the latter) aren’t necessarily trying to exploit you.
I guess it’s a question of costs vs. benefits and what your goals are. For most sorts of goals that people have, I suggest that status will probably help them achieve their goals to a similar degree that money could (think of the term “social capital”). I’ve noticed that people without much social experience, particularly with status interaction, often have an overly cynical outsider’s view of those sorts of interaction, which could lead to skewed estimate of costs and benefits.
Personally, I’ve found that many specific ways of acquiring social status or influence, even if not actively unethical, don’t fit my values or personality. Yet I feel a lot more comfortable rejecting them having tried them out, knowing that my arguments against them are based on empirical data, not on purely theoretical conceptions that may be subject to bias (e.g. self-deception, sour graps, slave morality).
You are worried about hypothetical people that say they are happy with their current social status when they really are not.
I’m worried about the truely less social being harangued to try and make them change themselves when they really don’t want to.
Until you recognise there is this group and include them in your plans for social change in some fashion (even if it is only identify and leave alone), then you are just making their lives more difficult (in a well meaning fashion).
I never said you have to have them or that all of them will be, merely if you are a top flight CEO or politician they will be drawn to you compared to if you are a bum. Thieves don’t steal from paupers. I’m an Agreeable guy and would not want to have to be saying no to them or be rude to them. And being on my guard against them would cramp my style as well.
My current social setting where I have a lot of help that I can provide and enjoy providing, I am sort out by people that try and curry my favour (E.g. by saying things I am interested in are interesting when they don’t understand them). Also people try to talk to me to be my friend, which annoys me when I am wanting to do something else. Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind social interaction, I would just prefer it to be non-verbal, humourous, about a plan they have or based on shared intellectual interests.
Normally what they talk to me is about worries about the course and bitching. This I find I have nothing to add to really or interest in. Which probably colours my social interactions.
Yes. Or when they want things that higher social status can help them achieve, which they don’t realize or are in denial about.
To make an analogy again to money, there are lots of people who say that they don’t care much about money, or don’t like the process of making money, but who want things (e.g. possessions, getting out of debt, donating to charities, or whatever), that can most efficiently be achieved through having more money than they currently have. For instance, let’s say we have someone who is in $10,000 credit card debt, who would love to donate to SIAI, but who says that he isn’t very concerned with money. At face value at least, something isn’t matching up.
What I encourage is for such people to (a) do some soul-searching about what their actual goals are, (b) be realistic about what means it will take to achieve those goals, and (c) attempt to avoid bias in an evaluation of the costs and benefits of those means.
I would want my example person to assess the value of paying off his debt and donating to SIAI, and what he is going to need to do to achieve those goals. Making some money is not the only way to achieve them, but it is one of the most direct ways. As a result, I would encourage an analysis of the costs and benefits of seeking more money, vs. other means for achieving his goals.
If he can find other ways to achieve his goals, then great! What I’m just skeptical of is people sitting around with goals, and rejecting viable means for achieving those goals out of a biased and uninformed assessment of those means. I am also skeptical of people abandoning goals too early and then rationalizing that they don’t really want those things.
I am not worried about people being encouraged to avoid self-deception about their goals, and avoid bias in their cost-benefit analyses of the means for those goals. I feel that people who don’t need such encouragement will easily shrug it off, and the cost of misplaced advice to them will be low. Yet for people who need such encouragement, the cost of not receiving it is potentially quite high.
Of course, I want to encourage people to engage in that sort of scrutiny in ways that doesn’t make them feel “harangued.” Yet right now on LessWrong, my primary goal isn’t to be maximally persuasive to particular people; it’s to discuss the problem at a more abstract level. Once I understand the scope and prevalence of these particular sorts of problems better, and how to recognize when people might be falling prey to them, I will have a better sense of if/how I should attempt to persuade people to change their thinking.
I do recognize this group:
I have no objection to people deciding that there is higher marginal benefit in devoting their next unit of effort towards something other than social skills/status/influence. I just advocate that this decision be based on a minimally-biased analysis of the nature of social interaction, and of the costs and benefits of developing in those areas.
Unfortunately, people who are relatively unsocialized and inexperienced in status interaction often seem to have certain biases about how social interaction works, which are difficult to fix without more social experience (see pjeby’s excellent post about the differences in perception of social interaction between “cats” and “dogs”).
In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attractiveness, social skills, and social status, according to their own values. The marginal benefit of putting in a small amount of effort is pretty high for people who are initially deficient in those areas. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit, such as making small tweaks to body language and posture, wearing clothes that fit properly, doing something with one’s hair, and avoiding putting oneself down or overly apologizing for things.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
It is not just that. I get annoyed and tune out when anyone bitches and moans. Even people I like otherwise. Especially when they are trying to create ingroup outgroup divisions due to bruised egos (or at least that is how I interpret it).
Mating is the social arena where a modest improvement can pay off (if you are going for the monogamy route). A slight improvement might also work if the dating scene is not very competitive where you are. But if we are in the hyper competitive era where only the very attractive men get all the girls, then it won’t work very well. It is also the least likely arena for you to get hangers-on or require you to do unethical actions to get ahead, so from this point of view good for geeks.
So I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with this. Improving the ability of geeks to work in business and politics I think would get more push back due to ethics such as anti-advertising, truth-telling and simply having to spend a long time to get any good at it due to its competitive nature.
As others have pointed out, this seems highly exaggerated and doesn’t seem to match the current situation. Evidence for whether we are?
I don’t have evidence myself, I was merely exploring a hypothetical.
Nitpick: Yes they do. At least, a certain level of thief does. They’re easy targets.
Power to build vs. power to get
This is reminding me of Westerfeld’s Uglies, a pretty good science fiction novel about a society where everyone gets plastic surgery at age 16 to make them extremely beautiful.
As might be expected in a novel, there’s an arbitrarily added catch to the beauty, but would just having the surgery be standard be a bad idea?
The novel was inspired by Raphael Carter’s “”‘Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation’ by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin”″, a short story which explores the implication of people having the option of not noticing whether people are beautiful or not.
Thanks for the recommendations.
It does seem like there are tree options to reduce beauty-based inequalities:
Make less beautiful people more beautiful (which may indeed involve routine surgery in the future).
Make the beautiful people less beautiful (e.g. the Handicapper General).
Make people care about beauty less (feasible in the future, but only partially effective in the present since so much of perceptions of beauty seem biologically predisposed).
I support #1 in the present, and some combination of #1 and #3 in the future, when we have more effective ways of changing people’s preferences.
It might also be possible in future to mimic the effect of options 1 and 2 by altering one’s own perception of who is beautiful and who isn’t. (For example, instead of handicapping beautiful people, I could get my brain reprogrammed to see as ugly the people others see as beautiful.) This is like #3 in that it’s about altering someone other than the beautiful/non-beautiful people themselves, but different in that one changes what one sees as beautiful instead of how much one cares about beauty.
Some would suggest this gives you all sorts of practical benefits.
With just a little elaboration on the relevant bias at work this would make a fantastic top level post. This insight in particular made me laugh: