I remain, as ever, largely indifferent to status. As I have done elsewhere, including in the original posting, I am asking these questions both because I am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes; I am trying to follow the golden rule and offering others opportunities that I would appreciate having offered to me. If you find my questions annoying or of little value, I will stop asking them.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
On the other hand, claiming to not be status-seeking (and honestly believing that too, of course) is a typical mode of status-seeking behavior, and this explanation of your claim seems orders of magnitude more plausible.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people. It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them. Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
If what you mean is that there are biases that may make people who are sensitive to status liable to claim otherwise, then you could have used another item from the heuristics and biases literature to make a more effective analogy.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people
I’ve considered countering the argument for “deaf people” preemptively in the original comment, but thought it’s too obviously not applicable as analogy to the status thing to be actually used in a counter-argument. Silly me.
It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them.
I won’t say that it’s completely impossible (though it might be) to lack status drives, but that it’s very improbable and would be a serious neurological condition.
Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
Claiming to be deaf is best explained by being deaf in most situations; claiming to not seek status is best explained by a standard pattern in status-seeking present in most people. Besides, I’m not aware of status-breakdown as a known medical condition, which would make me see it as so much less probable, even if it’s known to experts. That there is still a chance for brain-damage being the cause doesn’t allow you to priviledge this particular hypothesis.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Even deeper. You can sever a few nerves and you get rid of pain and sound sensitivity and still function. Status sensitivity is built into the brain right through to the primitive level.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
It would? I sure as heck wouldn’t say autistic folks ‘function successfully/efficiently/rationally’ in general, and much of the therapy and education I hear about strikes me as being in part teaching about status sensitivity. (My mildly autistic cousin spent a great deal of time on working on his acting out and misbehaviour and acting ‘appropriately’ - a codeword for status sensitivity if I’ve ever seen one.)
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
I saw this had been voted up to +1 and went to correct it. Then I noticed that it was me who had voted it up, I don’t know why. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway, that comparison is idiotic. Why are you comparing autism to a coma? Why not compare it to, say, Triffids taking over the world. That is a bad thing too and only slightly less relevant. Your dismissal of the arguments is also unjustifiably absolute. There is a clear margin at the top of the ‘functional’ spectrum at which AS is personality trait that is far more adaptive in many ways than various other traits that we consider ‘normal’ despite being suboptimal adaptions to the current environment.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
Deafness gives no benefit. AS does, even if they are outweighed by the disadvantages.
My apologies and downvote retracted; I made the unwarranted assumption that this conversation specifically included Asperger’s Syndrome under the Autism umbrella. I may have mixed it up with another thread.
In any case, you’re right. Classical autism is not a good thing.
np. There’s potentially an interesting discussion in Aspies and status sensitivity; are these people high functioning in the ways full-blown/classical autism is not except for social things like status sensitivity?
The biggest difference between Asperger’s Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism and full-blown Autism is IQ, ultimately.
Compared to neurotypical people, Aspies tend to have various social deficits, difficulty regulating emotion, a tendency to become preoccupied with narrow subjects and, less often, motor or sensory abnormalities. Along with lower IQ, full-blown autistics tend to have all of these symptoms (except possibly narrow-subject-preoccupation), and usually to a greater degree.
Agree and add that some of the serious undeniable deficits also vary by degree. An extremely high IQ aspie can also have crippling sensory integration problems while a lower IQ aspie may also have more mild problems to compensate for, leaving him ‘higher functioning’. Even those ‘various social deficits’ can differ in degree from ‘sufficiently below norm’ to irredeemably absent.
I wonder if using the word ‘and’ in the grandparent rather than the word ‘but’ would have better conveyed ‘elaboration’ rather than ‘correction’. I think so. Edited.
It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Though since we do know that there are people who don’t properly process sensory information, or who are in fact indifferent to pain, it is not implausible that LW might have people who actually were indifferent to status.
That being said, I do agree that “they care about status, but don’t want to admit it / but don’t realize it” is a considerably more plausible explanation if a random poster claims that they do not care about status. A person having Asperger’s considerably increases my credence their claim, though.
Data point: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. While I haven’t seen status-immunity singled out as a consequence of the condition, I think it’s at least plausible that it could be a part of the social impairment component.
I’m as confident as I can be that my ability to recognize status is learned, in the same way that I have no instinctual ability to read facial expressions and body language. I have learned to do these things, but it’s as if those abilities are external modules that have been bolted on to the rest of my thought processes; they require conscious effort in a way that language parsing (for example) does not.
If that counts as a “serious neurological condition,” then we may not disagree at all.
Sounds like we need something like the Implicit Association Test to measure people’s actual sensitivity to status and other qualities that people often misrepresent, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don’t know enough behavioral psychology to create such tests. Anyone?
Now that’s an interesting claim. I used to make it myself. What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status? Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status? Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior? How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes;
I could not possibly answer those questions with as much coherence as the question itself. Because that comment is a response to a trivial question and answers it with a one sentence reply then straightforward literal elaboration. In fact, if it did not take so much clicking I would remove every comment I have made on this thread except that one, leaving it as my poor, dead, canary. I still might. It is the kind of thing that appeals to me.
I upvoted this for the first section, and then read the second section and removed the upvote, as the second section would have elicited a downvote. I approve of your questioning of WrongBot’s claim to be indifferent to status, but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
If you considered that a threat then I understand why you would disapprove. I did not consider it a threat because by my estimation it would actually be to WB’s benefit and my (externally visible) detriment. People doing out-of-norm things while you are in conflict with them tends to raise your status, even when those things aren’t really anything to do with you. It shows that you are able to affect them, you have some power.
Actually, if I did bother to redact a conversation it would be approximately for the opposite reasoning as a threat. It would remind me that I ultimately cannot change other people’s behavior but I do have the ability to choose what situations I am a part of. Just walk away. Not walk away to prove a point to someone else. People would disapprove of me if I deleted comments, an undesirable thing. It proves a point to me, changing the way I think and respond in the future.
What is the worst thing that can happen if I refuse to engage in what my brain perceives as evil, even in a direct, inelegant or dramatic fashion? Some people will disapprove of me, maybe even think I’m infantile. Without meaning disrespect (AdeleneDawner is someone whose judgement has impressed me), some transient disapproval is not nearly as important as a boost in self-awareness. As a general observation I find that if show myself how to avoid unacceptable things with direct action I find myself able to instinctively and effortlessly avoid them in the future. The opposite to learned helplessness. In a generalized form this is a strategy that is recommended by many personal development and psychological methodologies.
So, while I don’t seem to have chosen to remove my comments here it is something I consider a positive action and would be quite willing to allow myself to do in the future. That being the case, and since it is not possible for you to downvote deleted comments, I will make some comments here to give you the chance to express your outrage in those hypothetical future cases.
My disapproval of the threat of deleting the comments was not based on it being a threat toward WrongBot, it was based on my dislike of incomplete archives: I don’t want to see it become normal for people to delete comments that are part of a conversation, and since I can’t express my irritation at actual instances of that, reacting to instances of people saying that they’re considering deleting comments is the next best option. That said, your reason in this case seems sound enough to be a justifiable exception to that, though I would certainly disapprove if you were to delete this explanation at the same time as the other comments.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status?
While I am not entirely indifferent status, I could be convinced that I cared more about status than I think I do if I were presented with statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status?
I don’t believe so, no. A challenge to my beliefs would need to rely on my behavior, though if you offered to test this question via mind-reading I would be quite excited to see such a process in action.
Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior?
I am nothing more than a sack of neurons wired up to a lump of meat. So far as I’m aware it’s impossible to make falsifiable claims about my beliefs without reference to my behavior, and so such claims are meaningless. Again, a mind-reading machine would solve this problem neatly. If you prefer, I could say that I behave as though I am largely indifferent to status, but I consider the two claims to be equivalent.
How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
My sack of neurons isn’t very good at unambiguously storing things, and this affects my behavior.
Good answers are always more coherent than the questions they answer.
That is shortest and the most explicitly circular argument I have ever seen.
You rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of your behavior on the grounds that you are not motivated by status, a belief you explain on the grounds that you are not presented with examples of your status-motivated behavior.
statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
You could point to anything I’ve ever done or said and claim that I did it because I desired status. I rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of my behavior because I believe there is a better explanation. It is possible that I asked him the questions that I did because I wanted to score points; I don’t have access to the workings of my own brain. But crying “status!” is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
I remain, as ever, largely indifferent to status. As I have done elsewhere, including in the original posting, I am asking these questions both because I am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes; I am trying to follow the golden rule and offering others opportunities that I would appreciate having offered to me. If you find my questions annoying or of little value, I will stop asking them.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
On the other hand, claiming to not be status-seeking (and honestly believing that too, of course) is a typical mode of status-seeking behavior, and this explanation of your claim seems orders of magnitude more plausible.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people. It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them. Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
If what you mean is that there are biases that may make people who are sensitive to status liable to claim otherwise, then you could have used another item from the heuristics and biases literature to make a more effective analogy.
I’ve considered countering the argument for “deaf people” preemptively in the original comment, but thought it’s too obviously not applicable as analogy to the status thing to be actually used in a counter-argument. Silly me.
I won’t say that it’s completely impossible (though it might be) to lack status drives, but that it’s very improbable and would be a serious neurological condition.
Claiming to be deaf is best explained by being deaf in most situations; claiming to not seek status is best explained by a standard pattern in status-seeking present in most people. Besides, I’m not aware of status-breakdown as a known medical condition, which would make me see it as so much less probable, even if it’s known to experts. That there is still a chance for brain-damage being the cause doesn’t allow you to priviledge this particular hypothesis.
Schizoid personality disorder seems to be one possible way it could break down.
Even deeper. You can sever a few nerves and you get rid of pain and sound sensitivity and still function. Status sensitivity is built into the brain right through to the primitive level.
Details?
How sure are you that this is true of autistic brains?
Even if autistic folks were completely insensitive to status, that wouldn’t necessarily say much about status sensitivity not being basic/primitive.
People in a coma don’t think or even always breathe, yet I would say that thinking and breathing are built into the brain down to the primitive core.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
It would? I sure as heck wouldn’t say autistic folks ‘function successfully/efficiently/rationally’ in general, and much of the therapy and education I hear about strikes me as being in part teaching about status sensitivity. (My mildly autistic cousin spent a great deal of time on working on his acting out and misbehaviour and acting ‘appropriately’ - a codeword for status sensitivity if I’ve ever seen one.)
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
I saw this had been voted up to +1 and went to correct it. Then I noticed that it was me who had voted it up, I don’t know why. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway, that comparison is idiotic. Why are you comparing autism to a coma? Why not compare it to, say, Triffids taking over the world. That is a bad thing too and only slightly less relevant. Your dismissal of the arguments is also unjustifiably absolute. There is a clear margin at the top of the ‘functional’ spectrum at which AS is personality trait that is far more adaptive in many ways than various other traits that we consider ‘normal’ despite being suboptimal adaptions to the current environment.
Deafness gives no benefit. AS does, even if they are outweighed by the disadvantages.
My apologies and downvote retracted; I made the unwarranted assumption that this conversation specifically included Asperger’s Syndrome under the Autism umbrella. I may have mixed it up with another thread.
In any case, you’re right. Classical autism is not a good thing.
np. There’s potentially an interesting discussion in Aspies and status sensitivity; are these people high functioning in the ways full-blown/classical autism is not except for social things like status sensitivity?
The biggest difference between Asperger’s Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism and full-blown Autism is IQ, ultimately.
Compared to neurotypical people, Aspies tend to have various social deficits, difficulty regulating emotion, a tendency to become preoccupied with narrow subjects and, less often, motor or sensory abnormalities. Along with lower IQ, full-blown autistics tend to have all of these symptoms (except possibly narrow-subject-preoccupation), and usually to a greater degree.
Agree and add that some of the serious undeniable deficits also vary by degree. An extremely high IQ aspie can also have crippling sensory integration problems while a lower IQ aspie may also have more mild problems to compensate for, leaving him ‘higher functioning’. Even those ‘various social deficits’ can differ in degree from ‘sufficiently below norm’ to irredeemably absent.
Agreed. It was not my intent to imply otherwise.
I wonder if using the word ‘and’ in the grandparent rather than the word ‘but’ would have better conveyed ‘elaboration’ rather than ‘correction’. I think so. Edited.
There is always some difficulty with executive function and attention control too.
Though since we do know that there are people who don’t properly process sensory information, or who are in fact indifferent to pain, it is not implausible that LW might have people who actually were indifferent to status.
That being said, I do agree that “they care about status, but don’t want to admit it / but don’t realize it” is a considerably more plausible explanation if a random poster claims that they do not care about status. A person having Asperger’s considerably increases my credence their claim, though.
Data point: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. While I haven’t seen status-immunity singled out as a consequence of the condition, I think it’s at least plausible that it could be a part of the social impairment component.
I’m as confident as I can be that my ability to recognize status is learned, in the same way that I have no instinctual ability to read facial expressions and body language. I have learned to do these things, but it’s as if those abilities are external modules that have been bolted on to the rest of my thought processes; they require conscious effort in a way that language parsing (for example) does not.
If that counts as a “serious neurological condition,” then we may not disagree at all.
Sounds like we need something like the Implicit Association Test to measure people’s actual sensitivity to status and other qualities that people often misrepresent, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don’t know enough behavioral psychology to create such tests. Anyone?
Now that’s an interesting claim. I used to make it myself. What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status? Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status? Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior? How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
I could not possibly answer those questions with as much coherence as the question itself. Because that comment is a response to a trivial question and answers it with a one sentence reply then straightforward literal elaboration. In fact, if it did not take so much clicking I would remove every comment I have made on this thread except that one, leaving it as my poor, dead, canary. I still might. It is the kind of thing that appeals to me.
I upvoted this for the first section, and then read the second section and removed the upvote, as the second section would have elicited a downvote. I approve of your questioning of WrongBot’s claim to be indifferent to status, but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
If you considered that a threat then I understand why you would disapprove. I did not consider it a threat because by my estimation it would actually be to WB’s benefit and my (externally visible) detriment. People doing out-of-norm things while you are in conflict with them tends to raise your status, even when those things aren’t really anything to do with you. It shows that you are able to affect them, you have some power.
Actually, if I did bother to redact a conversation it would be approximately for the opposite reasoning as a threat. It would remind me that I ultimately cannot change other people’s behavior but I do have the ability to choose what situations I am a part of. Just walk away. Not walk away to prove a point to someone else. People would disapprove of me if I deleted comments, an undesirable thing. It proves a point to me, changing the way I think and respond in the future.
What is the worst thing that can happen if I refuse to engage in what my brain perceives as evil, even in a direct, inelegant or dramatic fashion? Some people will disapprove of me, maybe even think I’m infantile. Without meaning disrespect (AdeleneDawner is someone whose judgement has impressed me), some transient disapproval is not nearly as important as a boost in self-awareness. As a general observation I find that if show myself how to avoid unacceptable things with direct action I find myself able to instinctively and effortlessly avoid them in the future. The opposite to learned helplessness. In a generalized form this is a strategy that is recommended by many personal development and psychological methodologies.
So, while I don’t seem to have chosen to remove my comments here it is something I consider a positive action and would be quite willing to allow myself to do in the future. That being the case, and since it is not possible for you to downvote deleted comments, I will make some comments here to give you the chance to express your outrage in those hypothetical future cases.
My disapproval of the threat of deleting the comments was not based on it being a threat toward WrongBot, it was based on my dislike of incomplete archives: I don’t want to see it become normal for people to delete comments that are part of a conversation, and since I can’t express my irritation at actual instances of that, reacting to instances of people saying that they’re considering deleting comments is the next best option. That said, your reason in this case seems sound enough to be a justifiable exception to that, though I would certainly disapprove if you were to delete this explanation at the same time as the other comments.
Parent and great-grand-parent upvoted.
I do understand your irritation and I will consider that as a factor if or when I happen to have an impulse to redact.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
OK, downvoted. I found this conversation difficult to follow with your redacted comments; it was very annoying.
While I am not entirely indifferent status, I could be convinced that I cared more about status than I think I do if I were presented with statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
I don’t believe so, no. A challenge to my beliefs would need to rely on my behavior, though if you offered to test this question via mind-reading I would be quite excited to see such a process in action.
I am nothing more than a sack of neurons wired up to a lump of meat. So far as I’m aware it’s impossible to make falsifiable claims about my beliefs without reference to my behavior, and so such claims are meaningless. Again, a mind-reading machine would solve this problem neatly. If you prefer, I could say that I behave as though I am largely indifferent to status, but I consider the two claims to be equivalent.
My sack of neurons isn’t very good at unambiguously storing things, and this affects my behavior.
Good answers are always more coherent than the questions they answer.
That is shortest and the most explicitly circular argument I have ever seen.
You rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of your behavior on the grounds that you are not motivated by status, a belief you explain on the grounds that you are not presented with examples of your status-motivated behavior.
You could point to anything I’ve ever done or said and claim that I did it because I desired status. I rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of my behavior because I believe there is a better explanation. It is possible that I asked him the questions that I did because I wanted to score points; I don’t have access to the workings of my own brain. But crying “status!” is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion.