You mentioned the possibility that it is status that makes people happy, but let me expand on this point.
This article reports on a large study by Boyce and Moore:
Boyce and Moore found that an individual’s rank, viewed this way, was a stronger predictor of happiness than absolute wealth. The higher a person ranked within his age group or neighborhood, the more status he had and the happier he was regardless of how much he made in dollars (or, in the study’s case, pounds).
Now here’s the key result: Relative income rank explained 30% of the variation in happiness in their study.
The implication is that it may be bad for your own happiness to give away a significant fraction of your income.
On the other hand, due to purchase of moral satisfaction not scaling with amount donated, it might be hedonically optimal to give, say, just a fraction of a percent, so that you don’t slip down the ranking, but you can still claim the personal moral satisfaction. Then, in addition, it would be better to optimize for a charity that gives maximal signalling value per dollar donated, for example by hosting charity gala events where you can be applauded for your generous 0.5%-of-income cheque. Does villagereach do swanky charity dinners?
I think that this consideration invalidates the (rather convenient for someone who donates to efficient charities) conclusion that the best way to donate also just happens to be best for the average donor’s happiness.
Thanks for bringing this issue up. I had thought of addressing it in the body of my main post but decided against it because it was already getting kind of long.
•It’s best for people who value improving the world and their relative status within their communities to spend their time in communities where improving the world is correlated with increased status. For example, people in this situation who live in a materialistic suburb like Orange County, CA might do well to move to a university town (like Santa Cruz, CA) where excessive materialism is frowned upon and where a greater than usual percentage of the population thinks that making charitable donations is cool.
•Now, things being as they are, I agree that despite my above point, it’s still not the case that “the best way to donate also just happens to be best for the average donor’s happiness.” This is because at present most people don’t care about effective charity. In this connection, I think that what GiveWell is doing is important for two reasons:
(1) It’s offering a community for people who do care about about effective charity. Members of this community can compete for relative status within the community by doing their best to maximize their positive social impact.
(2) By drawing attention to the case for effectiveness-oriented giving, GiveWell is working to push social norms in the population as a whole in the direction of higher emphasis on effectiveness-oriented giving. The more success that GiveWell has in this respect, the stronger the correlation will be between “engaging in effectiveness-oriented giving” and “raising relative status” even for the average donor.
GiveWell is working to push social norms in the population as a whole in the direction of higher emphasis on effectiveness-oriented giving. The more success that GiveWell has in this respect, the stronger the correlation will be between “engaging in effectiveness-oriented giving” and “raising relative status” even for the average donor.
Yes, this is important. Michael Vassar is saying something like this in his post on far-mode; that far-mode types don’t have immediate success, but they tend to (very) slowly change the norm in a positive direction.
You could even summarize by saying that there’s no point in being rational about social problems, because no-one will listen to you now, and in 100 years’ time the overall social convention will have shifted, like a giant glacier of stupid slowly falling into the sea of sanity.
Now here’s the key result: Relative income rank explained 30% of the variation in happiness in their study.
The implication is that it may be bad for your own happiness to give away a significant fraction of your income.
How is that the implication? If the ranking was based on income, rather than on how the income was spent, what would your giving (or lack thereof) have to do with it?
I want to say this in a separate comment because I know it’s going to get downvoted (but I am a sucker for telling the truth), and it is orthogonal to my other response (signalling value of conspicuous purchases overall):
For a male, being a poor bleeding-hearted liberal donor is not high-status behavior, with obvious penalties in terms of attracting the opposite gender (and I know I’ll get comments from women on LW saying that they find charitability attractive, and that other women do too, so let me head off such platitudes by asking for evidence, reminding people that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, and it would make sense for a woman to claim, in far mode, to like altruistic men, for the signalling value this provides her with, and then in near mode to subconsciously and effortlessly select a mate for herself based on how rich and high-status he is)
There may be further penalties in terms of not motivating yourself to make more money and status. It’s empirically the case that moderately rich people tend to be lovers of money, and go into the competition to make wealth using the dreams of higher status to motivate themselves. (some, on the other hand, come out the other end as altruists, e.g. Gates/Buffett)
Maybe multifoliaterose should add a gender comment to his article? Especially good for a woman, not so much for the male half of the species?
In fact I’m going to stick my neck out and say that if you did a gender breakdown of the original study, income would correlate with happiness via status much more for men.
I think you’re wrong here. Being poor is bad for men, of course. Being weak is also bad for men.
But charitable giving actually can signal wealth (you have enough to give away), social class (depends on the charity, but for example think how frequently you hear about microfinance at an Ivy League school), and a kind of strength (you have your life together enough to think of others—true incompetents are too busy with their own crises).
Charitable giving allows you to signal very high levels of wealth effectively, because you get newspaper coverage praising you for being able to donate millions (billions) of dollars. You don’t get that kind of recognition for donating, say, ten thousand dollars, so if you aren’t actually rich you get way more wealth signaling per dollar by buying clothes or club membership or a new car.
The evidence that “romantic priming increases charitable behavior in women (and in men it increases conspicuous consumption)” would be more probable if his hypothesis was true. If consumptive behavior rather than altruistic behavior is produced by romantic priming, that would be consistent with the former being more useful than the latter for romantic efforts. While this evidence is sufficient for me to locate Roko’s hypothesis, I don’t yet feel compelled.
There are tribes where men gain status by giving food away, so humans seem to have the potential to accord status to men for certain altruistic behavior in certain contexts. The U.S. is a different culture. Even here, I agree with you that there are ways that giving away things can signal wealth.
I’m willing to grant Roko the plausibility of certain forms of charitable giving reducing male status and attractiveness, though I also think there are ways it could have the opposite effect, depending on context, and the other characteristics of the man involved and the subculture he is in.
Let me use an example to throw some light on the issue. Suppose that you are a woman’s genes. You have a choice between two men. One is just an ordinary, eligible guy.
The other has made a solemn lifelong commitment to give 50% of his wealth away to random strangers.
Which sperm would you like to fertilize your egg with? Think about the kind of sons and grandsons that would be the result.
Now for the “provider”, beta-male role. Which man would you prefer as the guy who you get to use to support yourself and your (maybe his) children?
It seems clear in this spherical-cow model that donating a lot to charity is a good way to steer yourself towards the beta-male stereotype. Admittedly, reality is more complex, but I think that this should be the “zeroth order” approximation to which corrections are made.
Furthermore, if you start conversations about the minutiae of efficient charity, and how you donate 40% of your income to Singinst/Givewell/VillageReachwhatever, and how you have put a financial value on a human life, then I am struggling to find a context in which this would make you either popular or attractive.
But if you start conversations about the minutiae of efficient charity, and how you donate 40% of your income to Singinst/Givewell/VillageReachwhatever, and how you have put a financial value on a human life, then I am struggling to find a context in which this would make you either popular or attractive.
Suppose that you are a woman’s genes. You have a choice between two men. One is just an ordinary, eligible guy. The other has made a solemn lifelong commitment to give 50% of his wealth away to random strangers. Which sperm would you like to fertilize your egg with? Think about the kind of sons and grandsons that would be the result.
Such a commitment is a form of signalling, like a peacock’s tail. Someone who manages to keep that commitment can afford to do so, signaling wealth.
Sure, but you can also achieve the same signalling-of-wealth value by using 50% of your wealth to buy Ferraris, Gold watches and designer suits.
Is there any relevant difference between signalling wealth by charitable donation versus conspicuous consumption? I think so: from the female genes’ point of view, conspicuous consumption signals selfishness, the desire to look after your own, whereas the charity signals sucker-ness—the desire to help others who are not reciprocating.
This is the altruist’s burden: if you help society at large, you create the counterpoint public choice problem to the special interests problem in politics. You harm a concentrated interest (friends, partner, children) in order to reward a diffuse interest (helping each of billions of people infinitesimally).
The concentrated interest then retaliates, because by standard public choice theory it has an incentive to do so, but the diffuse interest just ignores you.
I think so: from the female genes’ point of view, conspicuous consumption signals selfishness, the desire to look after your own, whereas the charity signals sucker-ness—the desire to help others who are not reciprocating.
It’s much more complicated than that. By improper conspicuous consumption, you can easily end up signaling that you’re a sucker. Even worse, you’ll signal that you’re the sort of sucker who’s easy to separate from his money. You can probably imagine the possible consequences of that botched signal.
Generally speaking, effective conspicuous consumption is very difficult to pull off. This of course doesn’t apply to the level of conspicuous consumption that you’re expected to undertake to avoid coming off as a weirdo given your position in society, but anything beyond that is dangerously apt to backfire in a multitude of ways.
Regarding counter-signaling, I remember the “Too Cool for School” paper that was linked from Marginal Revolution a few years ago, along with the subsequent “False Modesty” paper that shares a co-author. These seem to be the standard references about the topic.
But more importantly, I don’t think academic insight in this area gathered so far is particularly worthwhile. Before getting into complex mathematical models can be really fruitful, we first need an informal common-sense overview of the situation, in order to know where to look for situations that provide suitable material for more solid theories. Unfortunately, in this regard, even the most insightful people have made only baby steps so far.
I actually think that the worst thing it does for a male is signal and create selflessness rather than selfishness/arrogance. You can’t be a “bad boy” if you’re giving money to VillageReach, and it’s hard to pull of alpha unless you’re also very rich.
But is anyone wholly a bad boy? Without a single altruistic moment? I’ve never met such a person. Not even the ones who look like “bad boys” at the outset. And are you really going to put in the effort to become such a person, one hundred per cent arrogant, just to pick up women? That’s your sole terminal value? If so, enjoy… but I think it’s a rare man who remains so singularly obsessed even after he’s proven to himself that he can succeed with women. Maybe I’m wrong.
Whatever is going on, I don’t think it’s unique to LW—on usenet, I noticed that whenever a post started with “I know I’m going to get flamed for this”, it wouldn’t get flamed and it wouldn’t have anything in it which struck me as likely to get flamed.
I don’t know if there’s something disarming about posts which start with that sort of nervousness, or (more likely) that people who are that sort of cautious overestimate how provocative they’re being.
I don’t know if there’s something disarming about posts which start with that sort of nervousness, or (more likely) that people who are that sort of cautious overestimate how provocative they’re being.
Perhaps we should recruit some local firebrands to keep 2d6 with their computer and roll on every opinion they express in a comment, adding the disclaimer every time they get 12.
The fact that we know that they’re doing this would probably invalidate the experiment, however.
What Roko keeps on saying—that women prefer high-status men—has a lot of truth to it, but there are countervailing considerations:
(1) [deleted for being an unimportant distraction]
(2) Men under 23 or so are given a pass: current income and current social status are not major considerations of most women contemplating a romance with a man under that age. Of course, it helps to seem to have prospects of high income or high social status, but most women are not particularly good judges of male prospects (and know that about themselves) and most men will be able to clear the prospects hurdle just by being a full-time college student or having a degree—and if that is not enough in the way of prospects for a particular woman, then having a father or even an uncle with high income or high social status will probably be.
(3) Since women who will go for a man under 23 or so typically place a lot of premium on high intelligence, if you are reading this web site, then unless you have some severe romantic handicap, if you make the usual level of effort to initiate romances when you are under 23 or so, there is a good chance that you find yourself in a romance with at least one woman who will want to stay with you for the rest or your life. (Roko is probably not interested in that: he probably wants to have romances with many, many women who scores as high as possible on the criterion most popular with men who want to have romances with many, many women. Hence his strong emphasis on social status.)
(4) Some women do not care much about income or social status. I have had two long-term relationships during a period in which I was chronically ill and my extremely-low income came entirely from Social Security disability payments plus in the case of relationship #2 federal housing subsidies. I was 27 when I started the first of these two relationships and 44 when I started the second. (Both of these women were very attracted to the fact that I was good at science, BTW. One hid the fact that my being good at science was an attractive property (I had to piece it together after we broke up) and even hid the correlated fact that she found science fiction inspiring, but then again I probably never brought sci fi up in conversation.)
(5) Among the women who care about your income and your position in society, most care about your level of social dominance more. The main determinants of social dominance are interpersonal skills that you can probably learn faster and with much less trouble than you can acquire high income or impressive position in society. To help with this learning, classes are available (e.g., in pickup, improvisation comedy (which is largely about status and dominance signalling) and the martial arts).
(6) On the subject of altruism and philanthropy specifically, being around a woman for long periods of time greatly increases your romantic chances with her. For this reason, one of the people who blog about pickup (Roissy I think) advises men to choose work in which attractive women outnumber men. Most kinds of philanthropy are like that. (I attended BIL PIL 2009 (BIL for the medical industry), and there were a striking number of beautful, intelligent, very inspiring women there (half of whom were in philanthropic organizations) -- and one of them seemed willing to continue talking to me as long as I wanted to talk, knowing about me only that I was attending BIL PIL 2009 and that I had an interest (not a career, just an interest, expressed by me with a sense of confidence in my abilities) in the application of computer-science research to philanthropy.)
Men under 23 or so are given a pass: current income and current social status are not major considerations of most women contemplating a romance with a man under that age.
Roko is using “status” in a much broader sense than income or job status. I think he is mainly addressing status in interpersonal interactions within the particular social milieu a man is in, e.g. who asserts themselves over who, who defers to who, etc… These sorts of status hierarchies start in childhood.
If someone believes that their social circles don’t have hierarchies, then think again. Even nice, egalitarian social circles have hierarchies; they are just subtle. For an example, if you and your friends are going out to dinner, who decides where? If there is a disagreement about what restaurant, who decides? Which lone group members are able to sway the entire group towards their preferences, and which can’t? When the bill comes, someone suggests dividing it equally even though some people ordered less expensive dishes. Can those group members assert that the bill should be divided differently?
None of the answers to these questions necessarily “prove” a particular ranking among every group of friends (for instance, some people just don’t like making decisions regardless of status; in some groups, the high status people might make these decisions, while in others, the high status people might push the decision work onto the lower status people.) Yet these are the kind of situations that can reveal subtle dominance battles.
if you and your friends are going out to dinner, who decides where? If there is a disagreement about what restaurant, who decides? Which lone group members are able to sway the entire group towards their preferences, and which can’t? When the bill comes, someone suggests dividing it equally even though some people ordered less expensive dishes. Can those group members assert that the bill should be divided differently?
When I am out with a single friend, or sometimes two, I tend to pick where we go unless I don’t want to (due to not knowing what’s available), break ties, successfully arrange to split appetizers I don’t want to eat by myself, and either pay for my own often-cheaper food or not pay at all.
This is because under these circumstances, I typically have Schellingesque limits on myself. I’m a vegetarian with certain strong food preferences beyond that which limit where I can and will eat, and will tend to stay home rather than go somewhere I can’t eat. I’m very frugal with my money, and will tend to stay home rather than enter a situation where I have to pay for dinner out (or any more than what I deliberately choose to pay for after looking at the prices). To get me to go to a restaurant involves picking one I expect to enjoy more than whatever I would cook for myself at home and buying me food there. I’m fairly difficult to take to dinner, actually, but people keep doing it anyway; I guess it’s too much of a cultural staple to discard.
I don’t think this is due to status, though, as I don’t have nearly the same group-swaying power if I go out with several friends, even when individually each of them would do as I pleased restaurant-wise one-on-one. I can sometimes still get someone to pay my way, but if and only if I am clearly the guest of just one person. (I can get my date to pay for me even on a double date; when I was staying with a friend over a summer and the deal was that she bought my food she paid for restaurant meals too even if we ate with a larger bunch of people.) I don’t always just stay home when a large group organizes a meal out because in that case I feel antisocial and whiny, and even when I do stay home, this lacks the ability to sway large groups (I think they think “she just didn’t feel like coming” instead of “we have not adequately satisfied her preferences and should work harder at it because we are her friends who should be able to have dinner at a restaurant with her”).
Edit: Sometimes a single person takes it upon him or herself to pay for everybody in a largeish group. I’m never this person, and have never in my memory been left out of such a collective payment. Paying for everybody seems to me like a high-status move.
tl;dr: I have complicated restaurant preferences and can get them met with individuals but not always groups.
The problem with these conversations is that everyone is permanently stuck in signalling mode, so the conversation inevitably becomes about the fairy-tale land of human self-propaganda.
so, there is a good chance that you find yourself in a romance with a least one woman who will want to stay with you for the rest or your life. (Roko is probably not interested in that: he probably wants to have romances with many, many women who scores as high as possible on the criterion most popular with men
In far mode, most men will say they want a woman who will “stay with them forever”, committed relationship, etc etc etc. For the reality, see this comic, especially the last panel.
The problem with these conversations is that everyone is permanently stuck in signalling mode, so the conversation inevitably becomes about the fairy-tale land of human self-propaganda.
...
For the reality, see this comic, especially the last panel.
The comic is drawn from the same fairyland, and citing fictional evidence is just more propaganda.
Speaking of being stuck in signalling mode, what else is this: “I know it’s going to get downvoted (but I am a sucker for telling the truth)”?
Perhaps drawn from a different fairy-land, namely that of a sort of cynical sarcasm.
To see the reality of things, you have to actually go out into the world and meet real people, and see the things that they actually do, the lives that they actually live.
People only know your real income from your profession and the toys you buy. The expensive clubs, the expensive cars, clothes and products. The neighborhood your house is in. The former (your profession) will give you something, but the latter is important.
People only know your real income from your profession and the toys you buy.
And yet, the study didn’t ask people how they perceived their rank, it simply ranked them by actual income.
So again, I don’t see how you can create this implication out of thin air from the study.
Heck, the study doesn’t even prove that high income rank creates happiness—it could just as easily be that the happiest people within a peer group will also tend towards the highest income.
But that combined with the empirical fact that rich people do buy things that make it obvious how rich they are does create the implication, at least probabilistically, though I agree that it would be much better to perform a more precise study.
(For example, you could give people a $1,000,000 income but stipulate that they had to give it all away to charities of their choice, and make it near-impossible for them to reliably tell anyone that they had done this)
But that combined with the empirical fact that rich people do buy things that make it obvious how rich they are
Wrong. People who want other people to think they’re rich engage in conspicuous consumption. Actual rich people (at least first-generation rich), not so much.
For example, you could give people a $1,000,000 income but stipulate that they had to give it all away to charities of their choice, and make it near-impossible for them to reliably tell anyone that they had done this.
That would be quite useless, if you haven’t first determined whether it’s relative happiness increasing relative income, or vice versa.
It seems very plausible to me that the belief that giving to inefficient charities doesn’t count as altruism would prevent one from gaining the more efficient fuzzies offered by inefficient charities and cause giving to efficient charities to count as altruism.
So not only should you not give to efficient charities, you should also strive to not even believe that there is such a thing as charitable efficiency.
Gosh, we seem to be predicting the behavior of ordinary people quite well!
I don’t think studies (which may well combine results for people with very different temperaments) should completely override individual experience.
Also, it’s stated in the article that most people spend their money very inefficiently. It should be possible to give a good bit to charity without impacting one’s status unless you assume that spending according to one’s station is completely defined by the spending habits of everyone else in a similar situation.
I think we’re considering two different standards for pursuing status. I’m suggesting that people could give a good bit to charity while pursuing status as effectively as others who have the same income. Additionally, they might be able to pursue status more effectively if they get the sort of psychological boost that multifoliaterose does.
It’s conceivable that someone who put a comparable amount of thought into pursuing status could do better than others with the same income if they didn’t give to charity, which I think is what you mean.
Just for the record, I think pursuing status is a major human motivation, but hardly the only one.
I just mean that, all other things equal, giving money away detracts from your ability to signal status. Sure, you can give away only a tiny amount, like 0.5%, which is what I suggested as the optimal amount for pursuing happiness in the original comment. But if you give a significant amount, like 40%, then you will noticeably fall in the status ranking.
You mentioned the possibility that it is status that makes people happy, but let me expand on this point.
This article reports on a large study by Boyce and Moore:
Boyce and Moore found that an individual’s rank, viewed this way, was a stronger predictor of happiness than absolute wealth. The higher a person ranked within his age group or neighborhood, the more status he had and the happier he was regardless of how much he made in dollars (or, in the study’s case, pounds).
Now here’s the key result: Relative income rank explained 30% of the variation in happiness in their study.
The implication is that it may be bad for your own happiness to give away a significant fraction of your income.
On the other hand, due to purchase of moral satisfaction not scaling with amount donated, it might be hedonically optimal to give, say, just a fraction of a percent, so that you don’t slip down the ranking, but you can still claim the personal moral satisfaction. Then, in addition, it would be better to optimize for a charity that gives maximal signalling value per dollar donated, for example by hosting charity gala events where you can be applauded for your generous 0.5%-of-income cheque. Does villagereach do swanky charity dinners?
I think that this consideration invalidates the (rather convenient for someone who donates to efficient charities) conclusion that the best way to donate also just happens to be best for the average donor’s happiness.
Thanks for bringing this issue up. I had thought of addressing it in the body of my main post but decided against it because it was already getting kind of long.
•It’s best for people who value improving the world and their relative status within their communities to spend their time in communities where improving the world is correlated with increased status. For example, people in this situation who live in a materialistic suburb like Orange County, CA might do well to move to a university town (like Santa Cruz, CA) where excessive materialism is frowned upon and where a greater than usual percentage of the population thinks that making charitable donations is cool.
•Now, things being as they are, I agree that despite my above point, it’s still not the case that “the best way to donate also just happens to be best for the average donor’s happiness.” This is because at present most people don’t care about effective charity. In this connection, I think that what GiveWell is doing is important for two reasons:
(1) It’s offering a community for people who do care about about effective charity. Members of this community can compete for relative status within the community by doing their best to maximize their positive social impact.
(2) By drawing attention to the case for effectiveness-oriented giving, GiveWell is working to push social norms in the population as a whole in the direction of higher emphasis on effectiveness-oriented giving. The more success that GiveWell has in this respect, the stronger the correlation will be between “engaging in effectiveness-oriented giving” and “raising relative status” even for the average donor.
Yes, this is important. Michael Vassar is saying something like this in his post on far-mode; that far-mode types don’t have immediate success, but they tend to (very) slowly change the norm in a positive direction.
You could even summarize by saying that there’s no point in being rational about social problems, because no-one will listen to you now, and in 100 years’ time the overall social convention will have shifted, like a giant glacier of stupid slowly falling into the sea of sanity.
How is that the implication? If the ranking was based on income, rather than on how the income was spent, what would your giving (or lack thereof) have to do with it?
I want to say this in a separate comment because I know it’s going to get downvoted (but I am a sucker for telling the truth), and it is orthogonal to my other response (signalling value of conspicuous purchases overall):
For a male, being a poor bleeding-hearted liberal donor is not high-status behavior, with obvious penalties in terms of attracting the opposite gender (and I know I’ll get comments from women on LW saying that they find charitability attractive, and that other women do too, so let me head off such platitudes by asking for evidence, reminding people that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, and it would make sense for a woman to claim, in far mode, to like altruistic men, for the signalling value this provides her with, and then in near mode to subconsciously and effortlessly select a mate for herself based on how rich and high-status he is)
There may be further penalties in terms of not motivating yourself to make more money and status. It’s empirically the case that moderately rich people tend to be lovers of money, and go into the competition to make wealth using the dreams of higher status to motivate themselves. (some, on the other hand, come out the other end as altruists, e.g. Gates/Buffett)
Society is not kind to men who are perceived as weak.
For women, the opposite applies: it has been shown that romantic priming increases charitable behavior in women. (and in men it increases conspicuous consumption)
Maybe multifoliaterose should add a gender comment to his article? Especially good for a woman, not so much for the male half of the species?
In fact I’m going to stick my neck out and say that if you did a gender breakdown of the original study, income would correlate with happiness via status much more for men.
I think you’re wrong here. Being poor is bad for men, of course. Being weak is also bad for men.
But charitable giving actually can signal wealth (you have enough to give away), social class (depends on the charity, but for example think how frequently you hear about microfinance at an Ivy League school), and a kind of strength (you have your life together enough to think of others—true incompetents are too busy with their own crises).
Charitable giving allows you to signal very high levels of wealth effectively, because you get newspaper coverage praising you for being able to donate millions (billions) of dollars. You don’t get that kind of recognition for donating, say, ten thousand dollars, so if you aren’t actually rich you get way more wealth signaling per dollar by buying clothes or club membership or a new car.
I think Roko’s view is up in the air.
The evidence that “romantic priming increases charitable behavior in women (and in men it increases conspicuous consumption)” would be more probable if his hypothesis was true. If consumptive behavior rather than altruistic behavior is produced by romantic priming, that would be consistent with the former being more useful than the latter for romantic efforts. While this evidence is sufficient for me to locate Roko’s hypothesis, I don’t yet feel compelled.
There are tribes where men gain status by giving food away, so humans seem to have the potential to accord status to men for certain altruistic behavior in certain contexts. The U.S. is a different culture. Even here, I agree with you that there are ways that giving away things can signal wealth.
I’m willing to grant Roko the plausibility of certain forms of charitable giving reducing male status and attractiveness, though I also think there are ways it could have the opposite effect, depending on context, and the other characteristics of the man involved and the subculture he is in.
Let me use an example to throw some light on the issue. Suppose that you are a woman’s genes. You have a choice between two men. One is just an ordinary, eligible guy.
The other has made a solemn lifelong commitment to give 50% of his wealth away to random strangers.
Which sperm would you like to fertilize your egg with? Think about the kind of sons and grandsons that would be the result.
Now for the “provider”, beta-male role. Which man would you prefer as the guy who you get to use to support yourself and your (maybe his) children?
It seems clear in this spherical-cow model that donating a lot to charity is a good way to steer yourself towards the beta-male stereotype. Admittedly, reality is more complex, but I think that this should be the “zeroth order” approximation to which corrections are made.
Furthermore, if you start conversations about the minutiae of efficient charity, and how you donate 40% of your income to Singinst/Givewell/VillageReachwhatever, and how you have put a financial value on a human life, then I am struggling to find a context in which this would make you either popular or attractive.
Mmmm. Rationalism.
Such a commitment is a form of signalling, like a peacock’s tail. Someone who manages to keep that commitment can afford to do so, signaling wealth.
Sure, but you can also achieve the same signalling-of-wealth value by using 50% of your wealth to buy Ferraris, Gold watches and designer suits.
Is there any relevant difference between signalling wealth by charitable donation versus conspicuous consumption? I think so: from the female genes’ point of view, conspicuous consumption signals selfishness, the desire to look after your own, whereas the charity signals sucker-ness—the desire to help others who are not reciprocating.
This is the altruist’s burden: if you help society at large, you create the counterpoint public choice problem to the special interests problem in politics. You harm a concentrated interest (friends, partner, children) in order to reward a diffuse interest (helping each of billions of people infinitesimally).
The concentrated interest then retaliates, because by standard public choice theory it has an incentive to do so, but the diffuse interest just ignores you.
Roko:
It’s much more complicated than that. By improper conspicuous consumption, you can easily end up signaling that you’re a sucker. Even worse, you’ll signal that you’re the sort of sucker who’s easy to separate from his money. You can probably imagine the possible consequences of that botched signal.
Generally speaking, effective conspicuous consumption is very difficult to pull off. This of course doesn’t apply to the level of conspicuous consumption that you’re expected to undertake to avoid coming off as a weirdo given your position in society, but anything beyond that is dangerously apt to backfire in a multitude of ways.
This seems like a nitpick: it is orthogonal to the point at issue.
I was’t attacking the point at issue. It just seemed worth pointing out as a digression.
Sure. Actually, I’d be interested if you had any academic references on the details of signalling theory, especially issues like counter-signalling
Regarding counter-signaling, I remember the “Too Cool for School” paper that was linked from Marginal Revolution a few years ago, along with the subsequent “False Modesty” paper that shares a co-author. These seem to be the standard references about the topic.
But more importantly, I don’t think academic insight in this area gathered so far is particularly worthwhile. Before getting into complex mathematical models can be really fruitful, we first need an informal common-sense overview of the situation, in order to know where to look for situations that provide suitable material for more solid theories. Unfortunately, in this regard, even the most insightful people have made only baby steps so far.
Evidence?
Sure, these effects could be significant, but really, how significant? How significant are the countervailing effects?
I actually think that the worst thing it does for a male is signal and create selflessness rather than selfishness/arrogance. You can’t be a “bad boy” if you’re giving money to VillageReach, and it’s hard to pull of alpha unless you’re also very rich.
I can see that.
But is anyone wholly a bad boy? Without a single altruistic moment? I’ve never met such a person. Not even the ones who look like “bad boys” at the outset. And are you really going to put in the effort to become such a person, one hundred per cent arrogant, just to pick up women? That’s your sole terminal value? If so, enjoy… but I think it’s a rare man who remains so singularly obsessed even after he’s proven to himself that he can succeed with women. Maybe I’m wrong.
How many comments with this sort of disclaimer end up downvoted on net? It seems like they’re usually >0.
Is this a problem in peoples mental models of LessWrong, or does it cause people to think differently? If the latter, is that an improvement?
Whatever is going on, I don’t think it’s unique to LW—on usenet, I noticed that whenever a post started with “I know I’m going to get flamed for this”, it wouldn’t get flamed and it wouldn’t have anything in it which struck me as likely to get flamed.
I don’t know if there’s something disarming about posts which start with that sort of nervousness, or (more likely) that people who are that sort of cautious overestimate how provocative they’re being.
Perhaps we should recruit some local firebrands to keep 2d6 with their computer and roll on every opinion they express in a comment, adding the disclaimer every time they get 12.
The fact that we know that they’re doing this would probably invalidate the experiment, however.
So have them do it on Reddit.
This comment of mine is going to get downvoted because it will have contributed nothing to the discussion.
Upvoted for contributing to the discussion.
Upvoted for inviting recursion.
What Roko keeps on saying—that women prefer high-status men—has a lot of truth to it, but there are countervailing considerations:
(1) [deleted for being an unimportant distraction]
(2) Men under 23 or so are given a pass: current income and current social status are not major considerations of most women contemplating a romance with a man under that age. Of course, it helps to seem to have prospects of high income or high social status, but most women are not particularly good judges of male prospects (and know that about themselves) and most men will be able to clear the prospects hurdle just by being a full-time college student or having a degree—and if that is not enough in the way of prospects for a particular woman, then having a father or even an uncle with high income or high social status will probably be.
(3) Since women who will go for a man under 23 or so typically place a lot of premium on high intelligence, if you are reading this web site, then unless you have some severe romantic handicap, if you make the usual level of effort to initiate romances when you are under 23 or so, there is a good chance that you find yourself in a romance with at least one woman who will want to stay with you for the rest or your life. (Roko is probably not interested in that: he probably wants to have romances with many, many women who scores as high as possible on the criterion most popular with men who want to have romances with many, many women. Hence his strong emphasis on social status.)
(4) Some women do not care much about income or social status. I have had two long-term relationships during a period in which I was chronically ill and my extremely-low income came entirely from Social Security disability payments plus in the case of relationship #2 federal housing subsidies. I was 27 when I started the first of these two relationships and 44 when I started the second. (Both of these women were very attracted to the fact that I was good at science, BTW. One hid the fact that my being good at science was an attractive property (I had to piece it together after we broke up) and even hid the correlated fact that she found science fiction inspiring, but then again I probably never brought sci fi up in conversation.)
(5) Among the women who care about your income and your position in society, most care about your level of social dominance more. The main determinants of social dominance are interpersonal skills that you can probably learn faster and with much less trouble than you can acquire high income or impressive position in society. To help with this learning, classes are available (e.g., in pickup, improvisation comedy (which is largely about status and dominance signalling) and the martial arts).
(6) On the subject of altruism and philanthropy specifically, being around a woman for long periods of time greatly increases your romantic chances with her. For this reason, one of the people who blog about pickup (Roissy I think) advises men to choose work in which attractive women outnumber men. Most kinds of philanthropy are like that. (I attended BIL PIL 2009 (BIL for the medical industry), and there were a striking number of beautful, intelligent, very inspiring women there (half of whom were in philanthropic organizations) -- and one of them seemed willing to continue talking to me as long as I wanted to talk, knowing about me only that I was attending BIL PIL 2009 and that I had an interest (not a career, just an interest, expressed by me with a sense of confidence in my abilities) in the application of computer-science research to philanthropy.)
Roko is using “status” in a much broader sense than income or job status. I think he is mainly addressing status in interpersonal interactions within the particular social milieu a man is in, e.g. who asserts themselves over who, who defers to who, etc… These sorts of status hierarchies start in childhood.
If someone believes that their social circles don’t have hierarchies, then think again. Even nice, egalitarian social circles have hierarchies; they are just subtle. For an example, if you and your friends are going out to dinner, who decides where? If there is a disagreement about what restaurant, who decides? Which lone group members are able to sway the entire group towards their preferences, and which can’t? When the bill comes, someone suggests dividing it equally even though some people ordered less expensive dishes. Can those group members assert that the bill should be divided differently?
None of the answers to these questions necessarily “prove” a particular ranking among every group of friends (for instance, some people just don’t like making decisions regardless of status; in some groups, the high status people might make these decisions, while in others, the high status people might push the decision work onto the lower status people.) Yet these are the kind of situations that can reveal subtle dominance battles.
When I am out with a single friend, or sometimes two, I tend to pick where we go unless I don’t want to (due to not knowing what’s available), break ties, successfully arrange to split appetizers I don’t want to eat by myself, and either pay for my own often-cheaper food or not pay at all.
This is because under these circumstances, I typically have Schellingesque limits on myself. I’m a vegetarian with certain strong food preferences beyond that which limit where I can and will eat, and will tend to stay home rather than go somewhere I can’t eat. I’m very frugal with my money, and will tend to stay home rather than enter a situation where I have to pay for dinner out (or any more than what I deliberately choose to pay for after looking at the prices). To get me to go to a restaurant involves picking one I expect to enjoy more than whatever I would cook for myself at home and buying me food there. I’m fairly difficult to take to dinner, actually, but people keep doing it anyway; I guess it’s too much of a cultural staple to discard.
I don’t think this is due to status, though, as I don’t have nearly the same group-swaying power if I go out with several friends, even when individually each of them would do as I pleased restaurant-wise one-on-one. I can sometimes still get someone to pay my way, but if and only if I am clearly the guest of just one person. (I can get my date to pay for me even on a double date; when I was staying with a friend over a summer and the deal was that she bought my food she paid for restaurant meals too even if we ate with a larger bunch of people.) I don’t always just stay home when a large group organizes a meal out because in that case I feel antisocial and whiny, and even when I do stay home, this lacks the ability to sway large groups (I think they think “she just didn’t feel like coming” instead of “we have not adequately satisfied her preferences and should work harder at it because we are her friends who should be able to have dinner at a restaurant with her”).
Edit: Sometimes a single person takes it upon him or herself to pay for everybody in a largeish group. I’m never this person, and have never in my memory been left out of such a collective payment. Paying for everybody seems to me like a high-status move.
tl;dr: I have complicated restaurant preferences and can get them met with individuals but not always groups.
The problem with these conversations is that everyone is permanently stuck in signalling mode, so the conversation inevitably becomes about the fairy-tale land of human self-propaganda.
In far mode, most men will say they want a woman who will “stay with them forever”, committed relationship, etc etc etc. For the reality, see this comic, especially the last panel.
The comic is drawn from the same fairyland, and citing fictional evidence is just more propaganda.
Speaking of being stuck in signalling mode, what else is this: “I know it’s going to get downvoted (but I am a sucker for telling the truth)”?
Perhaps drawn from a different fairy-land, namely that of a sort of cynical sarcasm.
To see the reality of things, you have to actually go out into the world and meet real people, and see the things that they actually do, the lives that they actually live.
I prefer to describe it as “loser shit”.
I was going to critique this, but this is a rationality site, so the critique would be too far off-topic.
And yet, for some reason, you seem determined to signal that you’re weak, by caring about this. ;-)
People only know your real income from your profession and the toys you buy. The expensive clubs, the expensive cars, clothes and products. The neighborhood your house is in. The former (your profession) will give you something, but the latter is important.
And yet, the study didn’t ask people how they perceived their rank, it simply ranked them by actual income.
So again, I don’t see how you can create this implication out of thin air from the study.
Heck, the study doesn’t even prove that high income rank creates happiness—it could just as easily be that the happiest people within a peer group will also tend towards the highest income.
But that combined with the empirical fact that rich people do buy things that make it obvious how rich they are does create the implication, at least probabilistically, though I agree that it would be much better to perform a more precise study.
(For example, you could give people a $1,000,000 income but stipulate that they had to give it all away to charities of their choice, and make it near-impossible for them to reliably tell anyone that they had done this)
Wrong. People who want other people to think they’re rich engage in conspicuous consumption. Actual rich people (at least first-generation rich), not so much.
That would be quite useless, if you haven’t first determined whether it’s relative happiness increasing relative income, or vice versa.
It seems very plausible to me that the belief that giving to inefficient charities doesn’t count as altruism would prevent one from gaining the more efficient fuzzies offered by inefficient charities and cause giving to efficient charities to count as altruism.
So not only should you not give to efficient charities, you should also strive to not even believe that there is such a thing as charitable efficiency.
Gosh, we seem to be predicting the behavior of ordinary people quite well!
I don’t think studies (which may well combine results for people with very different temperaments) should completely override individual experience.
Also, it’s stated in the article that most people spend their money very inefficiently. It should be possible to give a good bit to charity without impacting one’s status unless you assume that spending according to one’s station is completely defined by the spending habits of everyone else in a similar situation.
Well not if it reduces your ability to buy showy luxury items that signal your income rank!
My assumption is that people generally don’t think clearly about how they spend their money, including whether they’re pursuing status efficiently.
You seem to be presenting a false choice. The efficiency with which you pursue status is not positively impacted by giving your money away.
I think we’re considering two different standards for pursuing status. I’m suggesting that people could give a good bit to charity while pursuing status as effectively as others who have the same income. Additionally, they might be able to pursue status more effectively if they get the sort of psychological boost that multifoliaterose does.
It’s conceivable that someone who put a comparable amount of thought into pursuing status could do better than others with the same income if they didn’t give to charity, which I think is what you mean.
Just for the record, I think pursuing status is a major human motivation, but hardly the only one.
I just mean that, all other things equal, giving money away detracts from your ability to signal status. Sure, you can give away only a tiny amount, like 0.5%, which is what I suggested as the optimal amount for pursuing happiness in the original comment. But if you give a significant amount, like 40%, then you will noticeably fall in the status ranking.