“Status” as you are using it here is meaningless. There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider’s perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.
And in the polyamorous subculture, having multiple stable relationships is high status.
Furthermore, not all people are terribly sensitive to status. I find that trait attractive in potential romantic partners, so I’m quite safe in ignoring considerations of status entirely.
There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider’s perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.
This reinforces my point; it does not undermine it. I agree that it is a common error to view status as an single linear continuum. Members of subcultures have different status continua. If, however, you do not join that subculture, its continuum is irrelevant to you. Thus, for the vast majority of people who do not subscribe to the subculture of polyamory, what I said is essentially correct. If something inspires them to join this subculture, their values may change.
If you consider how the median person’s social circle (or date!) would react to the revelation that they are polyamorous, I think it proves my point. Most women on dates with men who called themselves poly would likely react, “Maybe, but not with me,” but would be more receptive to the idea if they were less concerned about having kids and if the man were more desirable than their typical options. I expect most men would either reject a woman who described herself as poly out of hand, or else see her as an easy lay but not a legitimate romantic partner. It’d be very interesting if someone tried to experimentally verify this, though I’m not sure if that could be done ethically.
As far as real-world effects, I would expect that your average poly man is relatively desirable, compared to your average poly woman, but I’m not really sure what the standard romantic marketplace looks like, so other factors (class, education, etc.) may skew this. The lifestyle is not purely choice driven, though, so I would expect the effect to be somewhat weak. I could also be totally wrong, if poly women are generally more “empowered” than I’m estimating, which is entirely possible.
I’m sure not all people are terribly sensitive to status, but with a multiple-continua definition of status, I bet there are a lot fewer exceptions than you might think. The drug-addled kids who sit around Telegraph avenue asking for spare change and pot may not care what their parents think, but I bet they care a fair amount about what their peers think.
Thus, for the vast majority of people who do subscribe to the subculture of polyamory, what I said is essentially correct.
I suspect you meant “do not subscribe.”
I could also be totally wrong, if poly women are generally more “empowered” than I’m estimating, which is entirely possible.
My evidence is largely anecdotal, but I suspect that this is the case. Men and women in the poly subculture seem to have approximately the same attractiveness distribution as the broader population, though only if you control for the subculture’s demographics, which skew heavily towards white, young, liberal, geeky, pagan bisexuals. Members of those demographics likewise skew towards feminism, egalitarianism, and other such ideals, so one should certainly expect poly women to be more “empowered,” which so far as I can tell they are.
“Status” as you are using it here is meaningless. There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider’s perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.
But how much of the status within the subculture is a reflection of the same traits that enhance one’s status in the mainstream society? Honestly, I don’t think the answer is zero even for subcultures much more extreme than polyamorists.
Moreover, since subcultures don’t function as closed autarkic worlds (except for some religious sects), their members still have to struggle to make a living and maintain their functionality within the mainstream society. Are you really saying that people in polyamourous relationships are largely indifferent to how successful and well-adjusted their partners are in the broader society outside the subculture?
And in the polyamorous subculture, having multiple stable relationships is high status.
I certainly don’t doubt this, but surely the traits and skills that enable one to elicit and maintain attraction from multiple concurrent partners in the polyamorous subculture are not altogether different from those that make one attractive to potential partners for more traditional arrangements in the mainstream society. Or would you really claim the opposite?
Furthermore, not all people are terribly sensitive to status. I find that trait attractive in potential romantic partners, so I’m quite safe in ignoring considerations of status entirely.
That sounds like an extremely strong claim. If you started constantly behaving in ways that would tremendously lower your status among people in the mainstream society, do you think that this wouldn’t affect your status and prospects in the polyamorous community at all?
“Not terribly sensitive to status” isn’t the same thing as completely indifferent to it or committed to lowering one’s status.
I think a great many people aren’t working to raise their status, even if they’re making some efforts to keep it from being lowered.
One of my friends who’s in a triad has said she doesn’t think that polyamory is consistent with maximum achievement—intimate relationships with more people simply takes more time and attention than being in a two-person relationship.
“Not terribly sensitive to status” isn’t the same thing as completely indifferent to it or committed to lowering one’s status.
I think a great many people aren’t working to raise their status, even if they’re making some efforts to keep it from being lowered.
Trouble is, many important status-enhancing behaviors are as natural as breathing air for some people, but mysterious, unnatural, and hard to pull off for others. People of the latter sort have to commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow.
When people whose natural behavior is decently good status-wise say that they’re “not terribly sensitive to status,” it’s as if someone with good language skills said he was not terribly sensitive to fluency of speech, without stopping to consider the fate of folks suffering from noticeable speech impediments. The analogy is not perfect, in that many more people suffer from impediments in social behavior than in speech, but the basic point holds: just like generating fluent speech, navigating through human status games is a task of immense complexity, which however some people can handle adequately or even superbly without any conscious effort—which can make them think that there isn’t really anything significant about it, if they haven’t stopped to consider the problems of those who aren’t as lucky in that regard.
So, yes, lots of people who don’t suffer from status-related problems aren’t investing effort in raising or maintaining their status, in the same sense that they aren’t investing effort in maintaining their language skills. For them, the hard work is done by their brains at subconscious levels, and manifests itself as spontaneous adequate behavior. That, however, doesn’t mean that the whole issue is vacuous, no more than the fact that most people speak normally without conscious effort (and some with great eloquence) means that linguistics is a vacuous science.
For the record, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s about a decade back; believe me when I say that I’m one of those people who’s had to “commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow.”
If anything, I’d say that having to deal with status in a conscious and deliberate way has caused my status-indifference: I have a very clear picture of how shallow that game is. I only play it when I need to.
I’d agree with Nancy that polyamory isn’t consistent with maximum achievement. Devoting resources to intimate relationships always has that effect, even if you only have one at a time; polyamory necessarily requires more of an investment. It’s a trade-off that I’m more than happy to make, but your priorities may not agree. It’s (potentially) a good reason not to be interested in polyamory.
One of my friends who’s in a triad has said she doesn’t think that polyamory is consistent with maximum achievement—intimate relationships with more people simply takes more time and attention than being in a two-person relationship.
I was thinking about that, and realizing that none of the people in the triad are extremely ambitious.
Polyamory might well be consistent with achievement if the group includes ambitious people, and might be better than monogamy if the number of people who want to be in support roles are more than half the group.
If you started constantly behaving in ways that would tremendously lower your status among people in the mainstream society, do you think that this wouldn’t affect your status and prospects in the polyamorous community at all?
To make this comment a bit more concrete, imagine if you (or those around you) suddenly started picking their noses incessantly, farting a lot, and speaking like rednecks with no conception of how to conjugate english verbs.
Even better: suppose you started behaving in ways that are commonly associated with the epithet “dorky.” To make the point especially relevant, focus on those ways that are characteristic of large numbers of people who live peaceful, productive, and honest lives, but suffer from social ineptitude.
As someone who isn’t terribly sensitive to status, I often find this site’s emphasis on it puzzling. Have you seen this post for further discussions unpacking status?
That wasn’t just a joke, though to judge by the upvotes, it’s a better joke than I thought it was.
Telling people that their motives are less reputable than they thought is a way of lowering their status and raising your own. It’s tiresome from Marxists and Freudians, and at least for me, too much of it produces a feeling of intellectual claustrophobia. Motive-mongering can prove anything, involves unproven guesses about what other people are driven by, and leaves out major parts of the world.
In particular, status is about non-rational motives for acceding to people. If everyone was completely run by status considerations, nothing useful would be getting done. (There’s that Gladwell essay I can’t find which suggests that status competition is especially pernicious when people have nothing useful to do, as in high school, prisons, and the court of Louis XIV.)
Status is an important feature of how people live with each other, and it makes perfect sense to want enough skill at it to live a good life and accomplish what you care about.
However, there’s got to be a complex interaction between status (some but not all of which is based on proving that you can afford to waste effort and resources) and accomplishment. I’ve brought up the subject a few times, but I don’t seem to be able to get a grip on it, and no one else seems to have anything to say about it. Is it a non-problem, only interesting to me, or so hard that there’s just nothing to say at this point?
A couple of questions about status—how do you keep from being blinded by other people’s high status? How do you notice valuable people who aren’t good at status?
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings
have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say
that the situation degenerates into a popularity
contest. And that’s exactly what happens in most American
schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one’s
rank depends mostly on one’s ability to increase one’s
rank. It’s like the court of Louis XIV. There is no
external opponent, so the kids become one another’s
opponents.
My impression is that there’s more pressure in soccer than in other sports for the players to keep the game interesting, though (again a matter of impression) I thought that was more about tactics involving more than one member of the team, and possibly grace of motion.
Goalies throwing themselves to one side are probably more interesting to watch than goalies standing in the middle.
I’m less clear about whether kickers aiming low (a duel between the kicker and goalie) are more interesting than a high pressure moment in which the kicker aims high and gets the ball in or not.
I wonder whether that article will affect how player handle penalty kicks.
However, there’s got to be a complex interaction between status (some but not all of which is based on proving that you can afford to waste effort and resources) and accomplishment. I’ve brought up the subject a few times, but I don’t seem to be able to get a grip on it, and no one else seems to have anything to say about it. Is it a non-problem, only interesting to me, or so hard that there’s just nothing to say at this point?
It is a very difficult and complex question, which can’t be discussed in its full generality in a single comment. It certainly involves numerous perplexing and counterintuitive phenomena where it’s hard to even begin analyzing the situation coherently.
A couple of questions about status—how do you keep from being blinded by other people’s high status? How do you notice valuable people who aren’t good at status?
Well, the only honest answers to both questions would be—sometimes, possibly even often, I don’t. But admitting that status is often a key force in shaping our beliefs that we nevertheless see as products of flawless logic and clear moral imperatives is a necessary condition to even begin disentangling our situation.
I don’t know, it’s a really complex question. If I ever form anything approaching a sketch of a complete theory, I’ll probably post it. But certainly no simple proposition will do.
As someone who isn’t terribly sensitive to status, I often find this site’s emphasis on it puzzling.
Well, that’s sort of like saying that you’re not terribly sensitive to the issue of eating and drinking—maybe you really don’t think about it much overall, but it’s still an essential part of how you function within the human society.
Eating is rarely used as an explanation for anything around here, whereas the word “status” often appears in proposed answers to various questions: why hasn’t there been a male counterpart to the feminist movement, why are most women monogamous, and so on.
My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. “women are institutionally lower status than men”) readily debunked, or at best true only if you pick precisely the right one out of the many meanings of “status”. (So that, to make an effective argument, you should really use the more precise term in the first place—prestige, reputation, wealth, political power, or what have you.)
The term often masks sloppy thinking of the virtus dormitiva variety: it replaces a question about a puzzling or poorly understood phenomenon with an “answer” that is really just a bit of jargon, and fails to advance our understanding by identifying a regularity relating more primitive objects of our experience. (In the case of the feminist movement, “who has the right to vote” turns out to be that kind of regularity, for instance: it’s not even particularly hard to improve on “status” as an explanation.)
I have reached a point where I now suspect the mere appearance of “status” in an argument on LW is a useful heuristic to detect sloppy thinking.
Eating is rarely used as an explanation for anything around here, whereas the word “status” often appears in proposed answers to various questions:
Your dark arts don’t work on me. Eating? Why should eating be used as an explanation for everything? It’s just not as relevant. In fact, in many conversations using the word status I could instead describe the relevant insights in terms of eating. It would basically involve writing a paragraph or two of detailed explanation and using search and replace on all instances. But I shouldn’t do this. We use words to represent higher level constructs because it saves time and allows us to fit a greater amount of understanding into our limited ~7 slots of working memory.
I have reached a point where I now suspect the mere appearance of “status” in an argument on LW is a useful heuristic to detect sloppy thinking.
How can I reply to that except with a clear contradiction? “We don’t use ‘eating’ therefore we shouldn’t use ‘status’” is sloppy thinking. Using the word ‘status’ to refer to a whole body of strongly correlated behaviours and the interactions thereof in social animals is merely practical.
Morendil has been pressing a “don’t say status” agenda here for over a year, often with the claim “you can’t make any testable predictions based on ‘status’”. I have previously made an offhand attempt to humor that implied challenge by reference to body language in humans (as an example of the class social animal). The response to body language signals predictably varies according to objective measures of ‘status’, such as job, age, connectedness in a social map and even the most primitive metric of popularity. If I recall correctly Morendil’s response was to simply deny the data. That is simply not an option for me.
If I didn’t understand status, if I extracted the ‘status node’ from my map because it was sloppy, then I would be ill equipped to survive in the world. The only way you can expect to succeed in the world without understanding status is if you already have a strong unconscious competence in the related practical skills. Without that you can expect to:
Die.
Not get laid.
Be severely handicapped in your friendships.
Get fired.
Or, at the very least, avoid all the above problems by working far harder to learn all the surface details of what works while ignoring the underlying pattern that could allow you to learn the related ‘status navigating’ skills in a general way.
No, I will use the word ‘status’ whenever it applies and I will defy any accusations that to do so is in any way evidence of sloppy thinking.
Eating? Why should eating be used as an explanation
Indeed. May I note I wasn’t the one to drag nutrition into this argument? As far as I can tell you’re echoing my objection.
Morendil has been pressing a “don’t say status” agenda here for over a year
Fact check: I registered around mid-september, and started voicing my skepticism of (some) status-related claims in early March.
But I’ll choose to take your observation as flattering—my writings on the topic must have been memorable to loom that large. :)
Still, it’s grossly misleading to summarize my views as “don’t say status”. I am not yet arrogant enough to ban a word that boldly. However I’ll have to agree with Eliezer that “concepts are not useful or useless of themselves. Only usages are correct or incorrect.”
My “agenda”, if I have one, is to better understand how the world works. If the concept “status” can be recruited in this effort, I’ll be glad to use it. I went to the trouble of procuring the Johnstone book, of scouring the Net for explanations that I couldn’t find here when I asked for them, and of writing up my observations and conclusions.
If I recall correctly Morendil’s response was to simply deny the data
Are you alluding to the exchange starting here? It’s the only one I can recall matching your description, but I don’t see what in my response warrants the label “denying the data”.
if I extracted the ‘status node’ from my map because it was sloppy, then I would be ill equipped to survive in the world
You have a lot more nodes that are more precise and useful in various situations, I have started enumerating them: prestige, reputation, popularity, wealth, social class, political power...
I have been pointing to (what I believe to be) diseased thinking about issues that activate the “status” node, and asking people to raise the quality of their explanations one notch by tabooing the term. I have rarely seen that done satisfactorily, and I have yet to be pointed to an authoritative source on “status theory”, showing good reasons to keep a “status” node.
You have a lot more nodes that are more precise and useful in various situations, I have started enumerating them: prestige, reputation, popularity, wealth, social class, political power...
No, if you think that those concepts can be used to compensate for an artificial prohibition against ‘status’ then you do not understand either the term or a broad aspect of human behavior. If people limit themselves to those nodes because a ‘status’ node is forbidden to them then they can be expected to:
Die.
Not get laid.
Be severely handicapped in your friendships.
Get fired.
Or, at the very least, avoid all the above problems by working far harder to learn all the surface details of what works while ignoring the underlying pattern that could allow you to learn the related ‘status navigating’ skills in a general way.
Things like prestige and wealth are useful concepts in their own right but to limit your thinking to only considering each of them independently is to impair your ability to form critical inferences about general patterns of human behavior.understand They are related concepts and more importantly human intuitions and behavioral instincts are integrally tied up in that relationship. A word to represent that area in a map of reality is critical.
There is a difference between tabooing a broad concept in a specific instance for the purpose of exploring a narrow topic in more detail and just plain tabooing to whatever extent you can. The latter is an epistemic parasite that needs to be crushed mercilessly whenever it appears. The below quote is a representative example:
I have reached a point where I now suspect the mere appearance of “status” in an argument on LW is a useful heuristic to detect sloppy thinking.
What you’re quoting me as saying is markedly different from saying that I wish for an outright ban on the word “status”. (I think you’re digging yourself into a hole, and I suggest you ought to stop digging.)
I wish we’d go back to specifics, for instance where I pointed out that “institutional status” was a poor explanation for why there hasn’t been a male counterpart of the feminist movement, and offered an alternative that was at least supported by historical facts (women organizing as a movement to seek the right to vote).
What you’re quoting me as saying is markedly different from saying that I wish for an outright ban on the word “status”.
I wouldn’t say that you did and even if you did expressing that wish would be counter-productive to the goal of achieving your desired influence. What I am countering, to whatever extent possible, is the introduction of trivial social pressure that impairs the ability of participants to develop a full understanding on how status influences the behavior of social mammals, particularly humans.
I think you’re digging yourself into a hole, and I suggest you ought to stop digging.
I disagree (and mildly object) to your claim, but not to the gist of the suggestion. My goal here is not to persuade you but to present a counter a counter to (what is in my judgment an extremely mild) toxic influence on the generalized conversation. This is not served by extended wrangling in one instance but rather by persistent response whenever such influence surfaces.
I wish we’d go back to specifics, for instance where I pointed out that “institutional status” was a poor explanation for why there hasn’t been a male counterpart of the feminist movement, and offered an alternative that was at least supported by historical facts (women organizing as a movement to seek the right to vote).
I don’t recall whether I commented on the topic but I share your objection to that usage. Any given concept should be used when, and only when, it is the most appropriate explanation for the context (that is, it balances brevity, clarity and accuracy).
Misusing the concept of ‘status’ when it doesn’t really help understanding things makes it harder to usefully draw inferences on things that actually rely on human status instincts in much the same way as associating the term in general with Bad Things. In this regard our purposes are mostly in alignment.
Another possible explanation is that a lot of the disproportionate mistreatment of men is by other men, so a simple gender split can’t address the problem.
This observation is in no way a criticism of Feminism but an approximately equal amount of the relevant mistreatment of women is from other women too. I don’t believe that problems relating to sexual discrimination or gender characterizations are often best explained in terms of actions of the other sex and or gender. The problems are rather a lot deeper than that.
IIRC, the comment I was replying to mostly mentioned unequal impact on men of war, and possibly of the legal system.
Feminism seems to deal with culturally driven abuse of women by women by blaming it on men. Since men have more overt power, this is at least vaguely plausible, though I think it leaves a lot out.
I’ve heard attempts to blame man vs. man abuse on women by saying that women prefer soldiers. I think this lacks plausibility because there’s obviously so much more driving wars.
The theory of sexual selection contains two parts: intersexual selection (mate choice) and intrasexual selection (competition within each sex. The view in evolutionary psychology is that males compete more fiercely than females in polygynous species like humans. In Male, Female, David Geary says that the primary theory for greater male body strength is female sexual selection pressures causing competition between males. A history of male-male competition is written onto men’s bodies. Greater female selectivity provides not only local incentives for greater competition between males, but appears to have caused males to be adapted for this competition.
Modern day war isn’t only only about male-male competition, of course. Though a lot of socially-harmful behavior throughout history may relate to male competition for status and resources. Female preferences create an incentive for this competition, even if women don’t actually like many of the forms that male competition ends up in (e.g. duels, video games, etc...).
To get even more speculative, I will propose that greater average male systemizing was sexually selected for. It’s probably similar to greater average male aggression: some women find it attractive, many don’t, and probably the main reason males have more of that trait is because they needed it to beat out other males.
It should go without saying that I’m not holding present-day or historical women morally responsible for the effects of their aggregate preferences on men.
Here’s a notion of mine: Knights compete for women by competing with other knights. Troubadours compete for women by getting good at things women like. When troubadours succeed, knights think it’s very unfair.
I could believe in evolutionary overshoot, where male-male competition becomes so reinforcing that it leads to less reproductive success.
These days, we’re living in an evolutionarily weird environment where higher status means fewer offspring. I’m not sure how long this has been going on.
In re upper body strength: How would you tell the difference between sexual selection by women vs. better ability to provide for and defend families?
For what it’s worth, I told my theory that war is actually a scam by older men to get their younger competition out of the way to a man, and he was shocked and annoyed. My theory had completely left out the younger men’s strongly felt motivations. Of course, even if I’m right, that wouldn’t be how things feel to the older men, either.
An alternate theory is that uninhibited young men are apt to be dangerous, and societies develop drastic methods of socializing them.
For what it’s worth, I told my theory that war is actually a scam by older men to get their younger competition out of the way to a man, and he was shocked and annoyed.
Probably not as much as a woman would be if you told her that becoming a soldier is an even worse deal for her than for young men, evolutionarily speaking.
Anyone want to take a crack at evolutionary pressures for nations, and in particular, the pressure to convince people that being soldiers is the one sure way for people without extraordinary talents to do something important with their lives?
Eh, I was asking the same thing last week. Check out the responses I got. That’s why I’m just throwing the warning flag, not saying you’ve committed the error.
I recently read Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, which heavily relies on the phenomenon you’re referring to but which was criticized for being group selectionist. (He views societies as being superorganisms that can collectively act in ways that further themselves, which results in individuals behaving very much like cells, and having the same tendencies, like gradually dying when they’re not put to use for the rest of the organism, which is how he explains suicidal tendencies.)
Probably not as much as a woman would be if you told her that becoming a soldier is an even worse deal for her than for young men, evolutionarily speaking.
Which would be even worse if you explained why, including the part that involves raping the women in the other tribe when you win and quite possibly killing the existing children.
A small difference in framing often makes a disproportionate difference in my response and I agree with everything you are saying here.
Even so, just considering the whole question of ‘blame’ feels odd to me. That’s a primarily social explanation and if it happens to have epistemic merit too that is just a bonus. Since I don’t feel personally involved in the question “blame” based thinking just doesn’t spring to mind naturally.
I expect a different experience on a question that is closer to home, that I am politically invested in. For example the meta question of the merit of blaming. When considering that topic it would undoubtedly feel natural to me to produce explanations blaming ‘blame’ for all sorts of epistemic and instrumental crimes. Mind you, these objections would for most part be accurate, valid and reasonable, but they would still be prompted by a whole different class of thought.
(Disclaimer: Posts written by me when time-since-sleeping > 30 can be expected to have far more errors in grammar and clarity of expression and slightly less intellectual merit at the level of underlying content.)
I have to proof read a lot more. Simple grammar errors slip in. Most commonly the ones you get if you change your mind about the best way to present something but end up putting half of the first version there and half of the second in a way that doesn’t really fit. I also outright type the wrong word sometimes, that part of my brain that links up concepts with labels is a real weak point. For most part I avoid the problem when writing but my vocabulary is totally abused. I can think in terms of all the words I know, I can phrase the sentences how they should flow given what I know to be words available to me, but sometimes the actual word is not accessible when I try to say/type it. Freaky stuff.
I don’t start losing the ability to program until about the 48 hour mark.
No, if you think that those concepts can be used to compensate for an artificial prohibition against ‘status’ then you do not understand either the term or a broad aspect of human behavior.
I may not understand the term then: what is the difference between “status” and “prestige” or “reputation”?
I will not give an exhaustive list explaining the difference or attempt to define the nuances of the boundaries between them (because that is hard and I am sure someone else is better qualified to answer.) What I will do is point out some obvious differences that spring to mind, cases where to use the words interchangeably would just be wrong.
Prestige is far less broad ranging in meaning than reputation. It refers to a ranking along some scale of generalized impressiveness with which you can demand they be considered.
Reputation can refer more generally to anything that popular belief attributes to you. This will particularly apply to traits that you can be expected to display. It may be the case that you have a reputation for doing good work and that this work has also given you prestige, but the two don’t always go hand in hand. You can have a reputation of not being as prestigious but of being right more often. You can have a reputation for being lousy at securing prestige...
Status can be influenced by prestige and reputation. With prestige in particular it is hard to get prestige without getting some degree of status. But you can certainly have status without having any prestige whatsoever.
Status is an approximation of what you would get if you could ask a tribe of social animals to line themselves up in order of dominance, rank or in general awesomeness.
Someone else (or me with more time) could almost certainly provide a clearer picture of the differences but that scratches the surface somewhat.
A lot of the talk here has been about what might be called ongoing status—the moment-by-moment behaviors which cause people to be taken account of or not.
I haven’t seen much about getting positional status—the official titles and achievements which (I think) mean you don’t need to put as much work into ongoing status.
That’s a good point. I suspect I tend to neglect that status element because, well, I understood authority and official authority and achievements when I was 5 and was competent (and somewhat perfectionist) in managing such status relationships. It was at least 15 years later that I began to really understand status in terms of social power and developed at least the rudimentary skills required to manage it.
I may not understand the term then: what is the difference between “status” and “prestige” or “reputation”?
Status is about people’s purely subjective perceptions of whom they admire and wish to associate with, imitate, and/or support—or, in case of low status, the opposite of these things—because it results in good feelings. (Though of course the situation is usually complicated by the entangled instrumental implications of these acts.)
Reputation is an established record of past behavior. Status can stem from reputation, but doesn’t have to. For example, strangers among whom you have no reputation of any kind will quickly evaluate your status based on various clues as soon as they meet you.
Prestige is a more elusive term. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for outstandingly good, high status-conferring reputation. At other times, it denotes a property of certain things or traits to signal high status by a broad social convention (e.g. a prestige club, or a prestige accent).
Status is about people’s purely subjective perceptions of whom they admire and wish to associate with, imitate, and/or support—or, in case of low status, the opposite of these things—because it results in good feelings.
So, status entirely depends on other people’s preferences? That is, a statement that person X is high status isn’t saying anything about X, but about the people around X and their opinions of X? In that case, status doesn’t seem very well defined: the exact same person, in the exact same situation and context, with the exact same behaviors could have a very different status depending on quirks of the people around.
To a large extent, yes. Status is, as Vladimir_Nesov put it, a godshatter concept. It only exists as a node in people’s brains, in their decision-making processes, so you don’t have one status-value (whatever that may consist of), you have one for every person evaluating you (including yourself).* But, as Vladimir_M details, it will often exhibit a lot of convergence across different evaluators, and in those cases we can safely just refer to “status” without too much ambiguity.
*Yes, technically this is written in a kind of silly way, but I hope it’s clear what’s meant...
So, status entirely depends on other people’s preferences? That is, a statement that person X is high status isn’t saying anything about X, but about the people around X and their opinions of X? In that case, status doesn’t seem very well defined: the exact same person, in the exact same situation and context, with the exact same behaviors could have a very different status depending on quirks of the people around.
Clearly, some particular behavior can have different status implications among different groups of people. For example, the proper way to dress to signal high status varies greatly between cultures, or even between different occasions within the same culture, and a mismatch may well have the opposite effect. Moreover, an action increasing your status in one group can simultaneously decrease it in another one that is overlapping or broader. For example, if you belong to a strict religious sect, then conspicuous devotional behaviors may raise your status within the sect, but make you look like a weirdo to other people and thus decrease your status in the broader society. I’d say this much should be obvious.
However, some status markers are a matter of near-consensus within large societies, or characteristic of significant portions of their inhabitants, or perhaps of disproportionately influential elite groups. Such considerations of status have immense importance for virtually all aspects of organized society, and they exert crucial influence on the opinions and behaviors of individuals. They are well defined within the given society and culture, though they likely won’t be invariant cross-culturally.
Finally, some status markers are arguably a human universal, though they may be concealed by slightly different ways in which they are expressed in different cultures. The role of such status markers in human social behaviors, and especially mating behaviors, is, for me at least, a fascinating topic.
In that case, status doesn’t seem very well defined: the exact same person, in the exact same situation and context, with the exact same behaviors could have a very different status depending on quirks of the people around.
That isn’t a reason to consider ‘status’ poorly defined. It just notes that it is (objectively) subjective. In fact, the very objection you are presenting here cuts to near the heart of what ‘status’ is a helpful shortcut to understanding.
As an exercise, substitute ‘rude’ into the above quote, replacing status. The two terms are quite similar in the way they have an objective meaning that depends on the subjective nature of other people in the environment.
In fact, in many conversations using the word status I could instead describe the relevant insights in terms of eating.
You can define status in terms of eating? As in “status is the ability to eat what you want, when you want, and deprive others of doing so”? I’m curious to know more details.
I have previously made an offhand attempt to humor that implied challenge by reference to body language in humans (as an example of the class social animal). The response to body language signals predictably varies according to objective measures of ‘status’, such as job, age, connectedness in a social map and even the most primitive metric of popularity.
I’d like to hear more about this. It sounds very interesting. Do you have a link or more details?
You can define status in terms of eating? As in “status is the ability to eat what you want, when you want, and deprive others of doing so”? I’m curious to know more details.
No, I can’t define status in terms of eating. I can describe many situations in which the word status is used in terms of eating, where such descriptions would clearly also require other effects that status has that are less direct than access to the spoils of a hunt or gifts to a pair-bonded partner.
(So that, to make an effective argument, you should really use the more precise term in the first place—prestige, reputation, wealth, political power, or what have you.)
Trouble is, often we don’t have a more precise term. Some kinds of status that are immensely important in human social relations can’t be reduced to any such concrete and readily graspable everyday terms, and insisting on doing so will lead to completely fallacious conclusions—it is akin to that proverbial drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost.
Of course, far better and more accurate explanations could be formulated if we had a precise technical vocabulary to describe all aspects of human status games. Unfortunately, we don’t have it, and we still have no accurate model of significant parts of these interactions either. But a vague-sounding conclusion is still better than a spuriously precise, but ultimately false and misleading one.
A good illustration is the extensive technical vocabulary used in PUA literature. Before this terminology was devised, there was simply no way to speak precisely about numerous aspects of male-female attraction—and attempts to shoehorn discussions and explanations into what can be precisely described with ordinary everyday words and concepts have misled many people into disastrously naive and wrong conclusions about these issues. Unfortunately, developing a more general technical terminology that would cover all human status considerations is a difficult task waiting to be done.
My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. “women are institutionally lower status than men”) readily debunked, or at best true only if you pick precisely the right one out of the many meanings of “status”.
If you believe that my explanations have been vacuous or based on factual or logical errors, then you’re always welcome to point out these problems. I have surely committed a great many intellectual errors in my comments here, but I think that failure to pursue arguments patiently in detail when challenged is not one of them. As for others, well, I don’t speak for others, nor do they speak for me.
My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. “women are institutionally lower status than men”) readily debunked,
Pardon me, but I find it somewhat impolite to claim that something I said is “easily debunked” when nobody seems to have debunked or even seriously attacked it in the first place. HughRistik did ask me to clarify what I meant by institutional status, but after I did, nobody challenged that. If you disagree with my response, please reply to that one directly.
ETA: Though I do find it amusing that I’m making a blatantly status-conserving move in a discussion about status. :)
OK, I’ll withdraw “debunked” as applied to that particular example, until I’ve had a chance to look at it more closely.
I stand by the claim that the alternative explanation (feminism as continuation of the women’s right to vote movement) sticks closer to the original query, so what was debunked was at least your claim to obviousness of your status-based explanation.
You mention that as an “alternative explanation”, but that sounds to me as an example of my explanation rather than something that excludes mine. Yes, feminism is probably a continuation of the women’s right to vote movement (which in turn was a continuation of earlier trends), and the women’s right to vote movement was a successful attempt to fix one particular issue that gave women a lower status. After the success of that one, feminism has concentrated on others.
“Status” as you are using it here is meaningless. There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider’s perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.
And in the polyamorous subculture, having multiple stable relationships is high status.
Furthermore, not all people are terribly sensitive to status. I find that trait attractive in potential romantic partners, so I’m quite safe in ignoring considerations of status entirely.
This reinforces my point; it does not undermine it. I agree that it is a common error to view status as an single linear continuum. Members of subcultures have different status continua. If, however, you do not join that subculture, its continuum is irrelevant to you. Thus, for the vast majority of people who do not subscribe to the subculture of polyamory, what I said is essentially correct. If something inspires them to join this subculture, their values may change.
If you consider how the median person’s social circle (or date!) would react to the revelation that they are polyamorous, I think it proves my point. Most women on dates with men who called themselves poly would likely react, “Maybe, but not with me,” but would be more receptive to the idea if they were less concerned about having kids and if the man were more desirable than their typical options. I expect most men would either reject a woman who described herself as poly out of hand, or else see her as an easy lay but not a legitimate romantic partner. It’d be very interesting if someone tried to experimentally verify this, though I’m not sure if that could be done ethically.
As far as real-world effects, I would expect that your average poly man is relatively desirable, compared to your average poly woman, but I’m not really sure what the standard romantic marketplace looks like, so other factors (class, education, etc.) may skew this. The lifestyle is not purely choice driven, though, so I would expect the effect to be somewhat weak. I could also be totally wrong, if poly women are generally more “empowered” than I’m estimating, which is entirely possible.
I’m sure not all people are terribly sensitive to status, but with a multiple-continua definition of status, I bet there are a lot fewer exceptions than you might think. The drug-addled kids who sit around Telegraph avenue asking for spare change and pot may not care what their parents think, but I bet they care a fair amount about what their peers think.
I suspect you meant “do not subscribe.”
My evidence is largely anecdotal, but I suspect that this is the case. Men and women in the poly subculture seem to have approximately the same attractiveness distribution as the broader population, though only if you control for the subculture’s demographics, which skew heavily towards white, young, liberal, geeky, pagan bisexuals. Members of those demographics likewise skew towards feminism, egalitarianism, and other such ideals, so one should certainly expect poly women to be more “empowered,” which so far as I can tell they are.
WrongBot:
But how much of the status within the subculture is a reflection of the same traits that enhance one’s status in the mainstream society? Honestly, I don’t think the answer is zero even for subcultures much more extreme than polyamorists.
Moreover, since subcultures don’t function as closed autarkic worlds (except for some religious sects), their members still have to struggle to make a living and maintain their functionality within the mainstream society. Are you really saying that people in polyamourous relationships are largely indifferent to how successful and well-adjusted their partners are in the broader society outside the subculture?
I certainly don’t doubt this, but surely the traits and skills that enable one to elicit and maintain attraction from multiple concurrent partners in the polyamorous subculture are not altogether different from those that make one attractive to potential partners for more traditional arrangements in the mainstream society. Or would you really claim the opposite?
That sounds like an extremely strong claim. If you started constantly behaving in ways that would tremendously lower your status among people in the mainstream society, do you think that this wouldn’t affect your status and prospects in the polyamorous community at all?
“Not terribly sensitive to status” isn’t the same thing as completely indifferent to it or committed to lowering one’s status.
I think a great many people aren’t working to raise their status, even if they’re making some efforts to keep it from being lowered.
One of my friends who’s in a triad has said she doesn’t think that polyamory is consistent with maximum achievement—intimate relationships with more people simply takes more time and attention than being in a two-person relationship.
NancyLebovitz:
Trouble is, many important status-enhancing behaviors are as natural as breathing air for some people, but mysterious, unnatural, and hard to pull off for others. People of the latter sort have to commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow.
When people whose natural behavior is decently good status-wise say that they’re “not terribly sensitive to status,” it’s as if someone with good language skills said he was not terribly sensitive to fluency of speech, without stopping to consider the fate of folks suffering from noticeable speech impediments. The analogy is not perfect, in that many more people suffer from impediments in social behavior than in speech, but the basic point holds: just like generating fluent speech, navigating through human status games is a task of immense complexity, which however some people can handle adequately or even superbly without any conscious effort—which can make them think that there isn’t really anything significant about it, if they haven’t stopped to consider the problems of those who aren’t as lucky in that regard.
So, yes, lots of people who don’t suffer from status-related problems aren’t investing effort in raising or maintaining their status, in the same sense that they aren’t investing effort in maintaining their language skills. For them, the hard work is done by their brains at subconscious levels, and manifests itself as spontaneous adequate behavior. That, however, doesn’t mean that the whole issue is vacuous, no more than the fact that most people speak normally without conscious effort (and some with great eloquence) means that linguistics is a vacuous science.
For the record, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s about a decade back; believe me when I say that I’m one of those people who’s had to “commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow.”
If anything, I’d say that having to deal with status in a conscious and deliberate way has caused my status-indifference: I have a very clear picture of how shallow that game is. I only play it when I need to.
I’d agree with Nancy that polyamory isn’t consistent with maximum achievement. Devoting resources to intimate relationships always has that effect, even if you only have one at a time; polyamory necessarily requires more of an investment. It’s a trade-off that I’m more than happy to make, but your priorities may not agree. It’s (potentially) a good reason not to be interested in polyamory.
Even monogamy isn’t always consistent with maximum achievement, as illustrated by the expression “married to the job”.
I was thinking about that, and realizing that none of the people in the triad are extremely ambitious.
Polyamory might well be consistent with achievement if the group includes ambitious people, and might be better than monogamy if the number of people who want to be in support roles are more than half the group.
To make this comment a bit more concrete, imagine if you (or those around you) suddenly started picking their noses incessantly, farting a lot, and speaking like rednecks with no conception of how to conjugate english verbs.
Even better: suppose you started behaving in ways that are commonly associated with the epithet “dorky.” To make the point especially relevant, focus on those ways that are characteristic of large numbers of people who live peaceful, productive, and honest lives, but suffer from social ineptitude.
As someone who isn’t terribly sensitive to status, I often find this site’s emphasis on it puzzling. Have you seen this post for further discussions unpacking status?
They’re just doing it to show off.
That wasn’t just a joke, though to judge by the upvotes, it’s a better joke than I thought it was.
Telling people that their motives are less reputable than they thought is a way of lowering their status and raising your own. It’s tiresome from Marxists and Freudians, and at least for me, too much of it produces a feeling of intellectual claustrophobia. Motive-mongering can prove anything, involves unproven guesses about what other people are driven by, and leaves out major parts of the world.
In particular, status is about non-rational motives for acceding to people. If everyone was completely run by status considerations, nothing useful would be getting done. (There’s that Gladwell essay I can’t find which suggests that status competition is especially pernicious when people have nothing useful to do, as in high school, prisons, and the court of Louis XIV.)
Status is an important feature of how people live with each other, and it makes perfect sense to want enough skill at it to live a good life and accomplish what you care about.
However, there’s got to be a complex interaction between status (some but not all of which is based on proving that you can afford to waste effort and resources) and accomplishment. I’ve brought up the subject a few times, but I don’t seem to be able to get a grip on it, and no one else seems to have anything to say about it. Is it a non-problem, only interesting to me, or so hard that there’s just nothing to say at this point?
A couple of questions about status—how do you keep from being blinded by other people’s high status? How do you notice valuable people who aren’t good at status?
You may be thinking of Paul Graham. In “Why Nerds are Unpopular” he says:
Thank you. That’s it. No wonder I couldn’t find it by searching on Gladwell.
You might like this piece—The social rationality of footballers.
Thanks.
My impression is that there’s more pressure in soccer than in other sports for the players to keep the game interesting, though (again a matter of impression) I thought that was more about tactics involving more than one member of the team, and possibly grace of motion.
Goalies throwing themselves to one side are probably more interesting to watch than goalies standing in the middle.
I’m less clear about whether kickers aiming low (a duel between the kicker and goalie) are more interesting than a high pressure moment in which the kicker aims high and gets the ball in or not.
I wonder whether that article will affect how player handle penalty kicks.
NancyLebovitz:
It is a very difficult and complex question, which can’t be discussed in its full generality in a single comment. It certainly involves numerous perplexing and counterintuitive phenomena where it’s hard to even begin analyzing the situation coherently.
Well, the only honest answers to both questions would be—sometimes, possibly even often, I don’t. But admitting that status is often a key force in shaping our beliefs that we nevertheless see as products of flawless logic and clear moral imperatives is a necessary condition to even begin disentangling our situation.
If you’re willing to take a crack at the interactions between status and efficacy, I’m interested in seeing it.
I don’t know, it’s a really complex question. If I ever form anything approaching a sketch of a complete theory, I’ll probably post it. But certainly no simple proposition will do.
Blueberry:
Well, that’s sort of like saying that you’re not terribly sensitive to the issue of eating and drinking—maybe you really don’t think about it much overall, but it’s still an essential part of how you function within the human society.
Eating is rarely used as an explanation for anything around here, whereas the word “status” often appears in proposed answers to various questions: why hasn’t there been a male counterpart to the feminist movement, why are most women monogamous, and so on.
My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. “women are institutionally lower status than men”) readily debunked, or at best true only if you pick precisely the right one out of the many meanings of “status”. (So that, to make an effective argument, you should really use the more precise term in the first place—prestige, reputation, wealth, political power, or what have you.)
The term often masks sloppy thinking of the virtus dormitiva variety: it replaces a question about a puzzling or poorly understood phenomenon with an “answer” that is really just a bit of jargon, and fails to advance our understanding by identifying a regularity relating more primitive objects of our experience. (In the case of the feminist movement, “who has the right to vote” turns out to be that kind of regularity, for instance: it’s not even particularly hard to improve on “status” as an explanation.)
I have reached a point where I now suspect the mere appearance of “status” in an argument on LW is a useful heuristic to detect sloppy thinking.
Your dark arts don’t work on me. Eating? Why should eating be used as an explanation for everything? It’s just not as relevant. In fact, in many conversations using the word status I could instead describe the relevant insights in terms of eating. It would basically involve writing a paragraph or two of detailed explanation and using search and replace on all instances. But I shouldn’t do this. We use words to represent higher level constructs because it saves time and allows us to fit a greater amount of understanding into our limited ~7 slots of working memory.
How can I reply to that except with a clear contradiction? “We don’t use ‘eating’ therefore we shouldn’t use ‘status’” is sloppy thinking. Using the word ‘status’ to refer to a whole body of strongly correlated behaviours and the interactions thereof in social animals is merely practical.
Morendil has been pressing a “don’t say status” agenda here for over a year, often with the claim “you can’t make any testable predictions based on ‘status’”. I have previously made an offhand attempt to humor that implied challenge by reference to body language in humans (as an example of the class social animal). The response to body language signals predictably varies according to objective measures of ‘status’, such as job, age, connectedness in a social map and even the most primitive metric of popularity. If I recall correctly Morendil’s response was to simply deny the data. That is simply not an option for me.
If I didn’t understand status, if I extracted the ‘status node’ from my map because it was sloppy, then I would be ill equipped to survive in the world. The only way you can expect to succeed in the world without understanding status is if you already have a strong unconscious competence in the related practical skills. Without that you can expect to:
Die.
Not get laid.
Be severely handicapped in your friendships.
Get fired.
Or, at the very least, avoid all the above problems by working far harder to learn all the surface details of what works while ignoring the underlying pattern that could allow you to learn the related ‘status navigating’ skills in a general way.
No, I will use the word ‘status’ whenever it applies and I will defy any accusations that to do so is in any way evidence of sloppy thinking.
Indeed. May I note I wasn’t the one to drag nutrition into this argument? As far as I can tell you’re echoing my objection.
Fact check: I registered around mid-september, and started voicing my skepticism of (some) status-related claims in early March.
But I’ll choose to take your observation as flattering—my writings on the topic must have been memorable to loom that large. :)
Still, it’s grossly misleading to summarize my views as “don’t say status”. I am not yet arrogant enough to ban a word that boldly. However I’ll have to agree with Eliezer that “concepts are not useful or useless of themselves. Only usages are correct or incorrect.”
I’m pretty sure you would agree too.
My “agenda”, if I have one, is to better understand how the world works. If the concept “status” can be recruited in this effort, I’ll be glad to use it. I went to the trouble of procuring the Johnstone book, of scouring the Net for explanations that I couldn’t find here when I asked for them, and of writing up my observations and conclusions.
Are you alluding to the exchange starting here? It’s the only one I can recall matching your description, but I don’t see what in my response warrants the label “denying the data”.
You have a lot more nodes that are more precise and useful in various situations, I have started enumerating them: prestige, reputation, popularity, wealth, social class, political power...
I have been pointing to (what I believe to be) diseased thinking about issues that activate the “status” node, and asking people to raise the quality of their explanations one notch by tabooing the term. I have rarely seen that done satisfactorily, and I have yet to be pointed to an authoritative source on “status theory”, showing good reasons to keep a “status” node.
A fair reply, and I retract my objection to that argument, agreeing that it is not relevant either way.
No, if you think that those concepts can be used to compensate for an artificial prohibition against ‘status’ then you do not understand either the term or a broad aspect of human behavior. If people limit themselves to those nodes because a ‘status’ node is forbidden to them then they can be expected to:
Die.
Not get laid.
Be severely handicapped in your friendships.
Get fired.
Or, at the very least, avoid all the above problems by working far harder to learn all the surface details of what works while ignoring the underlying pattern that could allow you to learn the related ‘status navigating’ skills in a general way.
Things like prestige and wealth are useful concepts in their own right but to limit your thinking to only considering each of them independently is to impair your ability to form critical inferences about general patterns of human behavior.understand They are related concepts and more importantly human intuitions and behavioral instincts are integrally tied up in that relationship. A word to represent that area in a map of reality is critical.
There is a difference between tabooing a broad concept in a specific instance for the purpose of exploring a narrow topic in more detail and just plain tabooing to whatever extent you can. The latter is an epistemic parasite that needs to be crushed mercilessly whenever it appears. The below quote is a representative example:
What you’re quoting me as saying is markedly different from saying that I wish for an outright ban on the word “status”. (I think you’re digging yourself into a hole, and I suggest you ought to stop digging.)
I wish we’d go back to specifics, for instance where I pointed out that “institutional status” was a poor explanation for why there hasn’t been a male counterpart of the feminist movement, and offered an alternative that was at least supported by historical facts (women organizing as a movement to seek the right to vote).
I wouldn’t say that you did and even if you did expressing that wish would be counter-productive to the goal of achieving your desired influence. What I am countering, to whatever extent possible, is the introduction of trivial social pressure that impairs the ability of participants to develop a full understanding on how status influences the behavior of social mammals, particularly humans.
I disagree (and mildly object) to your claim, but not to the gist of the suggestion. My goal here is not to persuade you but to present a counter a counter to (what is in my judgment an extremely mild) toxic influence on the generalized conversation. This is not served by extended wrangling in one instance but rather by persistent response whenever such influence surfaces.
I don’t recall whether I commented on the topic but I share your objection to that usage. Any given concept should be used when, and only when, it is the most appropriate explanation for the context (that is, it balances brevity, clarity and accuracy).
Misusing the concept of ‘status’ when it doesn’t really help understanding things makes it harder to usefully draw inferences on things that actually rely on human status instincts in much the same way as associating the term in general with Bad Things. In this regard our purposes are mostly in alignment.
Another possible explanation is that a lot of the disproportionate mistreatment of men is by other men, so a simple gender split can’t address the problem.
This observation is in no way a criticism of Feminism but an approximately equal amount of the relevant mistreatment of women is from other women too. I don’t believe that problems relating to sexual discrimination or gender characterizations are often best explained in terms of actions of the other sex and or gender. The problems are rather a lot deeper than that.
IIRC, the comment I was replying to mostly mentioned unequal impact on men of war, and possibly of the legal system.
Feminism seems to deal with culturally driven abuse of women by women by blaming it on men. Since men have more overt power, this is at least vaguely plausible, though I think it leaves a lot out.
I’ve heard attempts to blame man vs. man abuse on women by saying that women prefer soldiers. I think this lacks plausibility because there’s obviously so much more driving wars.
The theory of sexual selection contains two parts: intersexual selection (mate choice) and intrasexual selection (competition within each sex. The view in evolutionary psychology is that males compete more fiercely than females in polygynous species like humans. In Male, Female, David Geary says that the primary theory for greater male body strength is female sexual selection pressures causing competition between males. A history of male-male competition is written onto men’s bodies. Greater female selectivity provides not only local incentives for greater competition between males, but appears to have caused males to be adapted for this competition.
Modern day war isn’t only only about male-male competition, of course. Though a lot of socially-harmful behavior throughout history may relate to male competition for status and resources. Female preferences create an incentive for this competition, even if women don’t actually like many of the forms that male competition ends up in (e.g. duels, video games, etc...).
To get even more speculative, I will propose that greater average male systemizing was sexually selected for. It’s probably similar to greater average male aggression: some women find it attractive, many don’t, and probably the main reason males have more of that trait is because they needed it to beat out other males.
It should go without saying that I’m not holding present-day or historical women morally responsible for the effects of their aggregate preferences on men.
Here’s a notion of mine: Knights compete for women by competing with other knights. Troubadours compete for women by getting good at things women like. When troubadours succeed, knights think it’s very unfair.
I could believe in evolutionary overshoot, where male-male competition becomes so reinforcing that it leads to less reproductive success.
These days, we’re living in an evolutionarily weird environment where higher status means fewer offspring. I’m not sure how long this has been going on.
In re upper body strength: How would you tell the difference between sexual selection by women vs. better ability to provide for and defend families?
For what it’s worth, I told my theory that war is actually a scam by older men to get their younger competition out of the way to a man, and he was shocked and annoyed. My theory had completely left out the younger men’s strongly felt motivations. Of course, even if I’m right, that wouldn’t be how things feel to the older men, either.
An alternate theory is that uninhibited young men are apt to be dangerous, and societies develop drastic methods of socializing them.
Probably not as much as a woman would be if you told her that becoming a soldier is an even worse deal for her than for young men, evolutionarily speaking.
Anyone want to take a crack at evolutionary pressures for nations, and in particular, the pressure to convince people that being soldiers is the one sure way for people without extraordinary talents to do something important with their lives?
*throws group selection warning flag*
Is group selection problematic when it’s for memes?
Eh, I was asking the same thing last week. Check out the responses I got. That’s why I’m just throwing the warning flag, not saying you’ve committed the error.
I recently read Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, which heavily relies on the phenomenon you’re referring to but which was criticized for being group selectionist. (He views societies as being superorganisms that can collectively act in ways that further themselves, which results in individuals behaving very much like cells, and having the same tendencies, like gradually dying when they’re not put to use for the rest of the organism, which is how he explains suicidal tendencies.)
Which would be even worse if you explained why, including the part that involves raping the women in the other tribe when you win and quite possibly killing the existing children.
A small difference in framing often makes a disproportionate difference in my response and I agree with everything you are saying here.
Even so, just considering the whole question of ‘blame’ feels odd to me. That’s a primarily social explanation and if it happens to have epistemic merit too that is just a bonus. Since I don’t feel personally involved in the question “blame” based thinking just doesn’t spring to mind naturally.
I expect a different experience on a question that is closer to home, that I am politically invested in. For example the meta question of the merit of blaming. When considering that topic it would undoubtedly feel natural to me to produce explanations blaming ‘blame’ for all sorts of epistemic and instrumental crimes. Mind you, these objections would for most part be accurate, valid and reasonable, but they would still be prompted by a whole different class of thought.
(Disclaimer: Posts written by me when time-since-sleeping > 30 can be expected to have far more errors in grammar and clarity of expression and slightly less intellectual merit at the level of underlying content.)
30 hours? Really? And you can still manage to type and spell?
I have to proof read a lot more. Simple grammar errors slip in. Most commonly the ones you get if you change your mind about the best way to present something but end up putting half of the first version there and half of the second in a way that doesn’t really fit. I also outright type the wrong word sometimes, that part of my brain that links up concepts with labels is a real weak point. For most part I avoid the problem when writing but my vocabulary is totally abused. I can think in terms of all the words I know, I can phrase the sentences how they should flow given what I know to be words available to me, but sometimes the actual word is not accessible when I try to say/type it. Freaky stuff.
I don’t start losing the ability to program until about the 48 hour mark.
I may not understand the term then: what is the difference between “status” and “prestige” or “reputation”?
I will not give an exhaustive list explaining the difference or attempt to define the nuances of the boundaries between them (because that is hard and I am sure someone else is better qualified to answer.) What I will do is point out some obvious differences that spring to mind, cases where to use the words interchangeably would just be wrong.
Prestige is far less broad ranging in meaning than reputation. It refers to a ranking along some scale of generalized impressiveness with which you can demand they be considered.
Reputation can refer more generally to anything that popular belief attributes to you. This will particularly apply to traits that you can be expected to display. It may be the case that you have a reputation for doing good work and that this work has also given you prestige, but the two don’t always go hand in hand. You can have a reputation of not being as prestigious but of being right more often. You can have a reputation for being lousy at securing prestige...
Status can be influenced by prestige and reputation. With prestige in particular it is hard to get prestige without getting some degree of status. But you can certainly have status without having any prestige whatsoever.
Status is an approximation of what you would get if you could ask a tribe of social animals to line themselves up in order of dominance, rank or in general awesomeness.
Someone else (or me with more time) could almost certainly provide a clearer picture of the differences but that scratches the surface somewhat.
A lot of the talk here has been about what might be called ongoing status—the moment-by-moment behaviors which cause people to be taken account of or not.
I haven’t seen much about getting positional status—the official titles and achievements which (I think) mean you don’t need to put as much work into ongoing status.
That’s a good point. I suspect I tend to neglect that status element because, well, I understood authority and official authority and achievements when I was 5 and was competent (and somewhat perfectionist) in managing such status relationships. It was at least 15 years later that I began to really understand status in terms of social power and developed at least the rudimentary skills required to manage it.
Blueberry:
Status is about people’s purely subjective perceptions of whom they admire and wish to associate with, imitate, and/or support—or, in case of low status, the opposite of these things—because it results in good feelings. (Though of course the situation is usually complicated by the entangled instrumental implications of these acts.)
Reputation is an established record of past behavior. Status can stem from reputation, but doesn’t have to. For example, strangers among whom you have no reputation of any kind will quickly evaluate your status based on various clues as soon as they meet you.
Prestige is a more elusive term. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for outstandingly good, high status-conferring reputation. At other times, it denotes a property of certain things or traits to signal high status by a broad social convention (e.g. a prestige club, or a prestige accent).
Thanks for the explanation.
So, status entirely depends on other people’s preferences? That is, a statement that person X is high status isn’t saying anything about X, but about the people around X and their opinions of X? In that case, status doesn’t seem very well defined: the exact same person, in the exact same situation and context, with the exact same behaviors could have a very different status depending on quirks of the people around.
To a large extent, yes. Status is, as Vladimir_Nesov put it, a godshatter concept. It only exists as a node in people’s brains, in their decision-making processes, so you don’t have one status-value (whatever that may consist of), you have one for every person evaluating you (including yourself).* But, as Vladimir_M details, it will often exhibit a lot of convergence across different evaluators, and in those cases we can safely just refer to “status” without too much ambiguity.
*Yes, technically this is written in a kind of silly way, but I hope it’s clear what’s meant...
Edit: Oops, I got the Vladimirs mixed up...
Blueberry:
Clearly, some particular behavior can have different status implications among different groups of people. For example, the proper way to dress to signal high status varies greatly between cultures, or even between different occasions within the same culture, and a mismatch may well have the opposite effect. Moreover, an action increasing your status in one group can simultaneously decrease it in another one that is overlapping or broader. For example, if you belong to a strict religious sect, then conspicuous devotional behaviors may raise your status within the sect, but make you look like a weirdo to other people and thus decrease your status in the broader society. I’d say this much should be obvious.
However, some status markers are a matter of near-consensus within large societies, or characteristic of significant portions of their inhabitants, or perhaps of disproportionately influential elite groups. Such considerations of status have immense importance for virtually all aspects of organized society, and they exert crucial influence on the opinions and behaviors of individuals. They are well defined within the given society and culture, though they likely won’t be invariant cross-culturally.
Finally, some status markers are arguably a human universal, though they may be concealed by slightly different ways in which they are expressed in different cultures. The role of such status markers in human social behaviors, and especially mating behaviors, is, for me at least, a fascinating topic.
That isn’t a reason to consider ‘status’ poorly defined. It just notes that it is (objectively) subjective. In fact, the very objection you are presenting here cuts to near the heart of what ‘status’ is a helpful shortcut to understanding.
As an exercise, substitute ‘rude’ into the above quote, replacing status. The two terms are quite similar in the way they have an objective meaning that depends on the subjective nature of other people in the environment.
You said so in the grandparent. But repeated assertion does not constitute argument. (Or, if it does, it is argument of a relatively weak kind.)
You can define status in terms of eating? As in “status is the ability to eat what you want, when you want, and deprive others of doing so”? I’m curious to know more details.
I’d like to hear more about this. It sounds very interesting. Do you have a link or more details?
No, I can’t define status in terms of eating. I can describe many situations in which the word status is used in terms of eating, where such descriptions would clearly also require other effects that status has that are less direct than access to the spoils of a hunt or gifts to a pair-bonded partner.
Morendil:
Trouble is, often we don’t have a more precise term. Some kinds of status that are immensely important in human social relations can’t be reduced to any such concrete and readily graspable everyday terms, and insisting on doing so will lead to completely fallacious conclusions—it is akin to that proverbial drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost.
Of course, far better and more accurate explanations could be formulated if we had a precise technical vocabulary to describe all aspects of human status games. Unfortunately, we don’t have it, and we still have no accurate model of significant parts of these interactions either. But a vague-sounding conclusion is still better than a spuriously precise, but ultimately false and misleading one.
A good illustration is the extensive technical vocabulary used in PUA literature. Before this terminology was devised, there was simply no way to speak precisely about numerous aspects of male-female attraction—and attempts to shoehorn discussions and explanations into what can be precisely described with ordinary everyday words and concepts have misled many people into disastrously naive and wrong conclusions about these issues. Unfortunately, developing a more general technical terminology that would cover all human status considerations is a difficult task waiting to be done.
If you believe that my explanations have been vacuous or based on factual or logical errors, then you’re always welcome to point out these problems. I have surely committed a great many intellectual errors in my comments here, but I think that failure to pursue arguments patiently in detail when challenged is not one of them. As for others, well, I don’t speak for others, nor do they speak for me.
Pardon me, but I find it somewhat impolite to claim that something I said is “easily debunked” when nobody seems to have debunked or even seriously attacked it in the first place. HughRistik did ask me to clarify what I meant by institutional status, but after I did, nobody challenged that. If you disagree with my response, please reply to that one directly.
ETA: Though I do find it amusing that I’m making a blatantly status-conserving move in a discussion about status. :)
OK, I’ll withdraw “debunked” as applied to that particular example, until I’ve had a chance to look at it more closely.
I stand by the claim that the alternative explanation (feminism as continuation of the women’s right to vote movement) sticks closer to the original query, so what was debunked was at least your claim to obviousness of your status-based explanation.
Thank you.
You mention that as an “alternative explanation”, but that sounds to me as an example of my explanation rather than something that excludes mine. Yes, feminism is probably a continuation of the women’s right to vote movement (which in turn was a continuation of earlier trends), and the women’s right to vote movement was a successful attempt to fix one particular issue that gave women a lower status. After the success of that one, feminism has concentrated on others.