I don’t think “status blind”, the thing that leads to thoughts like “I don’t get how/why people keep bringing status into this instead of just looking at the arguments”, is what it is made out to be.
I used to be that kind of person. Back in college, my thesis adviser told me that he liked that I was willing to tell him when he was wrong, and that most of his students wouldn’t do that (that was the upside. there were downsides too). It completely blew my mind because I literally couldn’t grasp how it could be any other way. When I would point out that he was wrong, it wasn’t a sneaky way of saying “I’m smarter and higher status than you”, it was about the physics and status games just wasn’t the level we were speaking on.
However that doesn’t mean that “status” wasn’t a useful concept for describing how I interacted with people in general or that it wasn’t important to my interactions with him, even. It just means that the status requirements were satisfied , so that we could get to the good stuff. He saw himself as someone who was “smart, but not above making mistakes” and saw his students as “not having the same expertise, but not below understanding things and noticing his mistakes”, and I saw them similarly. Since we were in agreement there, there was room for me to say “Yo, you’re missing something” and for him to listen and say “Oops. What did I miss?”. If I had seen him as above making mistakes and myself as below being able to notice them, I wouldn’t be able to say “you’re missing something” because I wouldn’t be able to believe that it’s true over the hypothesis “I’m the one that is wrong”. I might be able to say “so I know I’m wrong, but can you explain to me how I’m wrong here?”, but if the difference is extreme enough it kinda crowds out your ability to even notice your own thoughts—since what do they matter anyway if you already know they’re hopelessly wrong? On the other side, if the professor sees themselves as beyond having fundamental misunderstandings and their students as below being able to have better understandings and the ability to see their mistakes, then so long as you can’t change their notions of status there is nothing you can do to communicate “you are fundamentally wrong about how this works” without them hearing it as “I don’t realize how far out of my depth I am right now”. I’ve been there too.
Status is invisible when it’s agreed upon, and when it’s not it always looks like it’s the other person who is the arrogant fool who can’t get over their status issues. “Status blindness” isn’t about opting out of status, it’s about having a different notion of status, not understanding how others determine status, and not having the perspective to notice that this is what’s going on. It’s certainly possible to be right that your notion of status is better, and for this to outweigh any loss of status in other peoples flawed perspectives. At the same time, to the extent that being able to interact with these other people are actually important, it really pays to understand what they’re doing when they have status objections and how to reach agreement on status levels so that you can get to the good stuff and start communicating.
Yeah, a better way of gesturing at what Eliezer means by “status-blind” might be “doesn’t reflexively assign status or deference to people based on a felt sense of how authoritative/respectable/impressive people are likely to view them as being.”
As a “status-sighted” person, I don’t think the difference feels internally like a distinct “emotion”; it feels more like people’s impressiveness is just baked into the world as an obvious, perceptible fact. It’s just goddamn different to meet a senator in full regalia versus meet the head of a local anarchist group.
If I weren’t deliberately trying to consider counterfactuals, though, in the moment I don’t think I’d ever consciously register that I’m unintentionally treating the senator differently because they just feel high-status to me. I might notice an isolated deferential act and rationalize it as a useful strategy, but that’s very different.
Indeed, I think that’s another factor that makes it really hard for me to notice when my behavior is authoritativeness-influenced—it doesn’t feel subjectively distinct from when part of my mind is quietly making a rational, calculated decision to play the politics game. The nervousness of saying something weirdbecause it might have specific known bad consequences feels more or less the same to me as the nervousness of saying something weird because it’s weird and I don’t know it just feels scary, and it takes real cognitive effort to even notice that I feel nervous and am basing my decision on the nervousness, much less to figure out whether the nervousness is based on a reasonable versus unreasonable model of how objectively scary failure, criticism, mockery, going it alone, alienating powerful people, etc. ought to be.
I agree with sil ver, too. This is one of the conclusions I reached when I tried to figure out why my output wasn’t as amazing as Eliezer’s or Scott’s, and what I could do to change that.
>Yeah, a better way at gesturing at what Eliezer means by “status-blind” might be “doesn’t reflexively assign status or deference to people based on a felt sense of how authoritative/respectable/impressive people are likely to view them as being.”
Yes, but I think the difference is in “how people are likely to view them” vs “how I see them”, and not in “doesn’t reflexively assign status or deference”.
>As a “status-sighted” person, I don’t think the difference feels internally like a distinct “emotion”; it feels more like people’s impressiveness is just baked into the world as an obvious, perceptible fact. It’s just goddamn different to meet a senator in full regalia versus meet the head of a local anarchist group.
This is what I meant when I said that status is invisible when agreed upon. In “competent elites”, Eliezer wrote that he was expecting to find “fools in business suits” and was shocked that these people were “visibly much smarter than average mortals” and felt “more alive”, even. This was two years before the “status blind” Eliezer of 2010, but this is a pretty clear depiction of his experience noting their surprisingly high status as an obvious perceptible fact about these people (as measured by him). Heck, he even described Jaynes as having a “magical aura of destiny”.
If he were to be unimpressed by some dressed up senator, it wouldn’t be because he is incapable of having the same status responses, just that the senators fancy pants obviously didn’t earn it to him.
>Indeed, I think that’s another factor that makes it really hard for me to notice when my behavior is authoritativeness-influenced is that it doesn’t feel subjectively distinct from when part of my mind is quietly making a rational, calculated decision to play the politics game.
Well sure, that’s how you implement these concerns. Similarly to how you can eat because you’re hungry and avoid painful things because it “hurts” without consciously thinking through whether or not you need more food or the spicy pepper is going to damage you. When you get down to the bottom of it though, emotions and even “physical pain” will completely change as you start to see things differently (and of course, won’t change so long as you’re just insisting to yourself that you “should” see it differently)
>I agree with sil ver, too. This is one of the conclusions I reached when I tried to figure out why my output wasn’t as amazing as Eliezer’s or Scott’s, and what I could do to change that.
so long as you can’t change their notions of status there is nothing you can do to communicate “you are fundamentally wrong about how this works” without them hearing it as “I don’t realize how far out of my depth I am right now”.
But from the other direction, it seems quite possible to hear what the wrong-status person says about how I’m wrong. So “nothing you can do” seems excessive. Perhaps politeness often suffices, for arguments that would be accepted when delivered by an appropriate-status person, as long as you are being heard at all.
I don’t think “status blind”, the thing that leads to thoughts like “I don’t get how/why people keep bringing status into this instead of just looking at the arguments”, is what it is made out to be.
I used to be that kind of person. Back in college, my thesis adviser told me that he liked that I was willing to tell him when he was wrong, and that most of his students wouldn’t do that (that was the upside. there were downsides too). It completely blew my mind because I literally couldn’t grasp how it could be any other way. When I would point out that he was wrong, it wasn’t a sneaky way of saying “I’m smarter and higher status than you”, it was about the physics and status games just wasn’t the level we were speaking on.
However that doesn’t mean that “status” wasn’t a useful concept for describing how I interacted with people in general or that it wasn’t important to my interactions with him, even. It just means that the status requirements were satisfied , so that we could get to the good stuff. He saw himself as someone who was “smart, but not above making mistakes” and saw his students as “not having the same expertise, but not below understanding things and noticing his mistakes”, and I saw them similarly. Since we were in agreement there, there was room for me to say “Yo, you’re missing something” and for him to listen and say “Oops. What did I miss?”. If I had seen him as above making mistakes and myself as below being able to notice them, I wouldn’t be able to say “you’re missing something” because I wouldn’t be able to believe that it’s true over the hypothesis “I’m the one that is wrong”. I might be able to say “so I know I’m wrong, but can you explain to me how I’m wrong here?”, but if the difference is extreme enough it kinda crowds out your ability to even notice your own thoughts—since what do they matter anyway if you already know they’re hopelessly wrong? On the other side, if the professor sees themselves as beyond having fundamental misunderstandings and their students as below being able to have better understandings and the ability to see their mistakes, then so long as you can’t change their notions of status there is nothing you can do to communicate “you are fundamentally wrong about how this works” without them hearing it as “I don’t realize how far out of my depth I am right now”. I’ve been there too.
Status is invisible when it’s agreed upon, and when it’s not it always looks like it’s the other person who is the arrogant fool who can’t get over their status issues. “Status blindness” isn’t about opting out of status, it’s about having a different notion of status, not understanding how others determine status, and not having the perspective to notice that this is what’s going on. It’s certainly possible to be right that your notion of status is better, and for this to outweigh any loss of status in other peoples flawed perspectives. At the same time, to the extent that being able to interact with these other people are actually important, it really pays to understand what they’re doing when they have status objections and how to reach agreement on status levels so that you can get to the good stuff and start communicating.
Yeah, a better way of gesturing at what Eliezer means by “status-blind” might be “doesn’t reflexively assign status or deference to people based on a felt sense of how authoritative/respectable/impressive people are likely to view them as being.”
As a “status-sighted” person, I don’t think the difference feels internally like a distinct “emotion”; it feels more like people’s impressiveness is just baked into the world as an obvious, perceptible fact. It’s just goddamn different to meet a senator in full regalia versus meet the head of a local anarchist group.
If I weren’t deliberately trying to consider counterfactuals, though, in the moment I don’t think I’d ever consciously register that I’m unintentionally treating the senator differently because they just feel high-status to me. I might notice an isolated deferential act and rationalize it as a useful strategy, but that’s very different.
Indeed, I think that’s another factor that makes it really hard for me to notice when my behavior is authoritativeness-influenced—it doesn’t feel subjectively distinct from when part of my mind is quietly making a rational, calculated decision to play the politics game. The nervousness of saying something weird because it might have specific known bad consequences feels more or less the same to me as the nervousness of saying something weird because it’s weird and I don’t know it just feels scary, and it takes real cognitive effort to even notice that I feel nervous and am basing my decision on the nervousness, much less to figure out whether the nervousness is based on a reasonable versus unreasonable model of how objectively scary failure, criticism, mockery, going it alone, alienating powerful people, etc. ought to be.
I agree with sil ver, too. This is one of the conclusions I reached when I tried to figure out why my output wasn’t as amazing as Eliezer’s or Scott’s, and what I could do to change that.
>Yeah, a better way at gesturing at what Eliezer means by “status-blind” might be “doesn’t reflexively assign status or deference to people based on a felt sense of how authoritative/respectable/impressive people are likely to view them as being.”
Yes, but I think the difference is in “how people are likely to view them” vs “how I see them”, and not in “doesn’t reflexively assign status or deference”.
>As a “status-sighted” person, I don’t think the difference feels internally like a distinct “emotion”; it feels more like people’s impressiveness is just baked into the world as an obvious, perceptible fact. It’s just goddamn different to meet a senator in full regalia versus meet the head of a local anarchist group.
This is what I meant when I said that status is invisible when agreed upon. In “competent elites”, Eliezer wrote that he was expecting to find “fools in business suits” and was shocked that these people were “visibly much smarter than average mortals” and felt “more alive”, even. This was two years before the “status blind” Eliezer of 2010, but this is a pretty clear depiction of his experience noting their surprisingly high status as an obvious perceptible fact about these people (as measured by him). Heck, he even described Jaynes as having a “magical aura of destiny”.
If he were to be unimpressed by some dressed up senator, it wouldn’t be because he is incapable of having the same status responses, just that the senators fancy pants obviously didn’t earn it to him.
>Indeed, I think that’s another factor that makes it really hard for me to notice when my behavior is authoritativeness-influenced is that it doesn’t feel subjectively distinct from when part of my mind is quietly making a rational, calculated decision to play the politics game.
Well sure, that’s how you implement these concerns. Similarly to how you can eat because you’re hungry and avoid painful things because it “hurts” without consciously thinking through whether or not you need more food or the spicy pepper is going to damage you. When you get down to the bottom of it though, emotions and even “physical pain” will completely change as you start to see things differently (and of course, won’t change so long as you’re just insisting to yourself that you “should” see it differently)
>I agree with sil ver, too. This is one of the conclusions I reached when I tried to figure out why my output wasn’t as amazing as Eliezer’s or Scott’s, and what I could do to change that.
Good. I hope it changes :)
I think I’m still missing some pieces of the puzzle, but I think we nearly-agree about everything.
But from the other direction, it seems quite possible to hear what the wrong-status person says about how I’m wrong. So “nothing you can do” seems excessive. Perhaps politeness often suffices, for arguments that would be accepted when delivered by an appropriate-status person, as long as you are being heard at all.