As long as you have status at all, you must have constant appraisal of others’ status.
I don’t do this. I may value others based upon their potential impact on the world, though, on a very subconscious level; I more consciously value others relative to me. Status only matters in so much as it can achieve or accomplish something, and thus is just one tool through which one pursues a goal hierarchically higher on one’s objective tree.
In doing so, they evaluate others’ taste (mental abilities / fitness) and ability to afford many new dresses (resources).
Being viewed as high-status only matters if those judging have value. I understand that in the microcosm of high school, people with little world-value can be high-status, and have the power to negatively affect one’s life; complying with their games makes sense in this instance. However, when those judging have no value on the scale of the game one plays or intends to play (work, mating, scholarship), then efforts undergone to have them think of one as high-status no longer make sense. In this case, buying a dress effects a net: decrease in personal funds, which I’m assuming are valued; increase in status judgment by party X, who has/have no value.
‘Tis then frivolous to partake in the games of party X as ‘twould only yield the loss of something valued, with no valued gains. I don’t enjoy frivolity that costs me something I value and gives me nothing I value, and I operate under the understanding that neither do others. Forcing someone to make an unnecessary value assessment of: negative value of social games vs. experience of ‘special event’, is cruel, as it’s an unbalanced choice; one knows the first negative value, but not the second. I don’t think the second value can be accurately calculated using Bayes’ theorem: too many variables (exempli gratia individual’s personalities, inclinations, intentions, resources, hidden plans, etcetera).
I think it cruel to force one to make uninformed value calculations. In this instance, the friend plays the game on the world and high school level; she knows party X has little to no value in the world game, but does have some value in the high school game, which she will soon leave. She can’t know the potential negative value of not complying with the games of party X, nor the potential positive value of attending the ‘special event’. I think this forced unbalanced value calculation cruel. I am also not particularly fond of your asking such a loaded question, but I can’t fault you for it.
Then you’re probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
Being viewed as high-status only matters if those judging have value.
To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn’t play the expensive status game. This seems to me like a pretty complete answer to your original question.
You might ask why they have value to her—you haven’t given the details for me to answer that. At the very least you said they are a majority of all women, so they probably include some friends of hers and new potential friends, else why would she go to these events at all?
Tis then frivolous to partake in the games of party X as ’twould only yield the loss of something valued, with no valued gains.
The valued gain is first of all the willingness of party X to interact with you. If you want it, you must pay the costs. If you don’t want it, you don’t care to play and don’t pay.
Why do you describe this as “forcing someone”? Everyone is free to choose with whom to associate. Everyone who plays the expensive games does so by choice. All the standard considerations of game theory apply.
Forcing someone to make an unnecessary value assessment of: negative value of social games vs. experience of ‘special event’, is cruel, as it’s an unbalanced choice; one knows the first negative value, but not the second.
Why not? If one has been to similar events in the past, and missed some events, one should have a good idea of the benefits to be had on average.
I don’t think the second value can be accurately calculated using Bayes’ theorem
Even if this is true, I don’t see why it’s more so than for most other aspects of the (social) world.
Yes, it’s hard to predict the opportunity value of a specific social event as opposed to on average. But consider that everyone attending the event is equally in the dark. If your friend could win (by whatever metric) by not going to social events (and not paying the cost), then she would do so, and others would notice and follow. So I predict on average people benefit individually from going to the events, even taking the cost into account.
Compare the opportunity of going to the events with me offering you the same bet on a biased coin toss every week. You pay money to bet against me, but the expected value of many bets is positive. Even though you can’t calculate the outcome of the next bet and may lose it (the coin is only slightly biased).
Why do you view the social events as an obligation or someone forcing someone else to participate, rather than an opportunity?
Having said that, from rather a devil’s advocate POV, I’ll try to address the question from another angle.
You may be thinking: a single person defecting from the game loses, but if only many people defected together, they could establish a group where people didn’t pay continuous costs and still offered each other the same opportunities. Then each of them would gain more value than from staying with the old group.
Now, if that worked and resulted in a stable and better-for-everyone outcome, people would do so more often. So why don’t they? Presumably the current solution is a Nash equilibrium, but why exactly? I don’t have a good single answer, but I can think of several possible factors:
Outdated adaptation execution: we are to an extent pre-wired to play the existing game and try raise the participation cost to whatever we ourselves can bear, so as to exclude lower-status people who can’t pay it. This worked ancestrally because people lived in relatively small groups (much smaller than the average school, let alone the wide world) and didn’t have the freedom to defect from a group and look for new associates elsewhere.
People really care and/or benefit from excluding lower status people from their groups. Your friend pays the cost and goes to the events, but some people simply cannot pay the cost (either in money or in dress-sense or in something else), so they never go to these events. There are social benefits to forming exclusive clubs (in game theoretical terms) which only require that the club be exclusive (doesn’t matter on which basis). For instance, it makes use of us vs. them ingroup/outgroup dynamics to strengthen in-group ties.
If the exclusive group is based on a really worthwhile metric (in evolutionary terms), then people benefit from joining, if only because they get exclusive access to a good pool of potential mates. As another example, if it’s based on money (being able to afford dresses), then it helps rich people network together, which is useful in the future when money becomes a powerful tool for rich people to help one another.
I am also not particularly fond of your asking such a loaded question, but I can’t fault you for it.
I don’t understand why my question was loaded. You asked why such-and-such cruel behavior existed. I asked, to clarify, why did you consider it cruel? Perhaps the behavior I have a mental image of isn’t what you mean.
I wish I could better understand your reaction to my question, and others’ reactions to my words in general (in the spirit of the current post). So I would appreciate it if you could explain why my question struck you as unpleasant and how I could have gone about it better. Thanks!
Then you’re probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
Actually, I find this quite useful. I’ve found (before I discovered the following) that those who care enough about status to write me off for not ‘playing the game’ are the same whom I’d rather not associate with; in a sense they self-filter themselves from my life, and I’m much happier for it.
To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn’t play the expensive status game. This seems to me like a pretty complete answer to your original question.
Agreed. Though I don’t think this answer fully solves the whole riddle of why some initiate the game at all.
You might ask why they have value to her—you haven’t given the details for me to answer that. At the very least you said they are a majority of all women, so they probably include some friends of hers and new potential friends, else why would she go to these events at all?
They are old friends with whom she was out of touch, and with whom she has recently started spending time again. Ironically, she (says she) detests every moment spent with them, as they have little to nothing in common. As to why she cares at all, I’ve not an idea.
Why do you describe this as “forcing someone”? Everyone is free to choose with whom to associate. Everyone who plays the expensive games does so by choice. All the standard considerations of game theory apply.
I use ‘force’ to refer to how one must play their game when deciding whether they wish to attend the event. Even in deciding to attend and not play the game by wearing a previously owned dress, or not attend and avoid the dilemma entirely, one still makes a decision heavily influenced by the mere existence of the game. As long as one has high-enough status, merely initiating the game forces everyone to play it, as one can’t make a comprehensive decision on whether to attend the event without taking the game into account.
Why not? If one has been to similar events in the past, and missed some events, one should have a good idea of the benefits to be had on average.
Indeed; however, the event in question (high-school senior prom) is entirely unique to her. School student government changes every year, and thus every year prom changes as well. The cathartic (marking the ending of a personal era) experience of the senior prom adds more to the event as well. Any other generic ‘special event’, though, would not apply—assuming one has previously attended a similar event.
Why do you view the social events as an obligation or someone forcing someone else to participate, rather than an opportunity?
I view such events as both an obligation and an opportunity—different for each party. To use the present example: for my friend, the event is an obligation; as far as can be predicted (not far), she loses more than she gains by attending. For another, though, the event might provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to secure a future with the lovely Sal Crenley. The following table represents my reasoning:
| | Projected Monetary | Projected Opportunity |
| Available Funds | Cost of Attending | Cost of Not Attending | End Result
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Friend | $600 | $600 | Unknown (Possibly Nought) | Known loss of monetary funds
| | | | - unknown opportunity cost
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Other | $3,000 | $1,200 | Lifelong Saudade | Worthwhile expenditure of
| | | | time & funds
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Potential factors numbers two and three have merit, and I’ll keep them in mind to test against future experiences.
So I would appreciate it if you could explain why my question struck you as unpleasant and how I could have gone about it better. Thanks!
I really appreciate your asking the question, and apologize if commenting on my emotional reaction to your question caused you distress. I think, on some level, I realized that you asked a sound question that would take me much time to respond; my aversion to this expenditure of time likely effected an emotional resentment. Why answer at all, then? Rationally, I knew the question needed answering, and would help me learn how to better express myself. The effort would be difficult, but according to my values, worth doing. I would not emotionally enjoy the experience however, and my subconscience resented you for presenting the opportunity for my brain to force itself to do an activity it wouldn’t enjoy.
I particularly appreciate how your question made me realize this—though not until after I’d posted. I used to love mulling the answers to these sorts of questions, but somewhere along the way I seem to have developed a dislike for them, probably due to repeated experience of tediously and verbosely proving an answer to such questions with overlong semantic proofs. Now I know I should neither completely forswear nor righteously pursue unloading these concepts, but should concisely answer them while still avoiding using leaps of logic. Thanks to your question, I can also now work on overwriting the nasty bit of emotional reaction brought on by loaded, difficult questions (the reason for why I perceive such behavior to be cruel had a difficult and complex answer—thus the ‘loaded’ question).
I shared my reaction to your question with you in order to expose any bias that may have affected my logic, and to give you a sense of the mental state your question effected within me. If you knew that asking for clarification on the foundation of a question’s premise might invoke an adverse reaction, then you might be better equipped for handling a similar situation in the future.
Less Wrong’s Markdown implementation doesn’t allow HTML, and there’s no way to do tables in the non-HTML part of Markdown, except for using spaces to separate the columns so that they line up in a fixed-width font, then indenting each line by four spaces.
| | Projected Monetary | Projected Opportunity |
| Available Funds | Cost of Attending | Cost of Not Attending | End Result
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Friend | $600 | $600 | Unknown (Possibly Nought) | Known loss of monetary funds
| | | | - unknown opportunity cost
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Other | $3,000 | $1,200 | Lifelong Saudade | Worthwhile expenditure of
| | | | time & funds
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
I don’t do this. I may value others based upon their potential impact on the world, though, on a very subconscious level; I more consciously value others relative to me. Status only matters in so much as it can achieve or accomplish something, and thus is just one tool through which one pursues a goal hierarchically higher on one’s objective tree.
Being viewed as high-status only matters if those judging have value. I understand that in the microcosm of high school, people with little world-value can be high-status, and have the power to negatively affect one’s life; complying with their games makes sense in this instance. However, when those judging have no value on the scale of the game one plays or intends to play (work, mating, scholarship), then efforts undergone to have them think of one as high-status no longer make sense. In this case, buying a dress effects a net: decrease in personal funds, which I’m assuming are valued; increase in status judgment by party X, who has/have no value.
‘Tis then frivolous to partake in the games of party X as ‘twould only yield the loss of something valued, with no valued gains. I don’t enjoy frivolity that costs me something I value and gives me nothing I value, and I operate under the understanding that neither do others. Forcing someone to make an unnecessary value assessment of: negative value of social games vs. experience of ‘special event’, is cruel, as it’s an unbalanced choice; one knows the first negative value, but not the second. I don’t think the second value can be accurately calculated using Bayes’ theorem: too many variables (exempli gratia individual’s personalities, inclinations, intentions, resources, hidden plans, etcetera).
I think it cruel to force one to make uninformed value calculations. In this instance, the friend plays the game on the world and high school level; she knows party X has little to no value in the world game, but does have some value in the high school game, which she will soon leave. She can’t know the potential negative value of not complying with the games of party X, nor the potential positive value of attending the ‘special event’. I think this forced unbalanced value calculation cruel. I am also not particularly fond of your asking such a loaded question, but I can’t fault you for it.
I hope I answered your question adequately.
Then you’re probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn’t play the expensive status game. This seems to me like a pretty complete answer to your original question.
You might ask why they have value to her—you haven’t given the details for me to answer that. At the very least you said they are a majority of all women, so they probably include some friends of hers and new potential friends, else why would she go to these events at all?
The valued gain is first of all the willingness of party X to interact with you. If you want it, you must pay the costs. If you don’t want it, you don’t care to play and don’t pay.
Why do you describe this as “forcing someone”? Everyone is free to choose with whom to associate. Everyone who plays the expensive games does so by choice. All the standard considerations of game theory apply.
Why not? If one has been to similar events in the past, and missed some events, one should have a good idea of the benefits to be had on average.
Even if this is true, I don’t see why it’s more so than for most other aspects of the (social) world.
Yes, it’s hard to predict the opportunity value of a specific social event as opposed to on average. But consider that everyone attending the event is equally in the dark. If your friend could win (by whatever metric) by not going to social events (and not paying the cost), then she would do so, and others would notice and follow. So I predict on average people benefit individually from going to the events, even taking the cost into account.
Compare the opportunity of going to the events with me offering you the same bet on a biased coin toss every week. You pay money to bet against me, but the expected value of many bets is positive. Even though you can’t calculate the outcome of the next bet and may lose it (the coin is only slightly biased).
Why do you view the social events as an obligation or someone forcing someone else to participate, rather than an opportunity?
Having said that, from rather a devil’s advocate POV, I’ll try to address the question from another angle.
You may be thinking: a single person defecting from the game loses, but if only many people defected together, they could establish a group where people didn’t pay continuous costs and still offered each other the same opportunities. Then each of them would gain more value than from staying with the old group.
Now, if that worked and resulted in a stable and better-for-everyone outcome, people would do so more often. So why don’t they? Presumably the current solution is a Nash equilibrium, but why exactly? I don’t have a good single answer, but I can think of several possible factors:
Outdated adaptation execution: we are to an extent pre-wired to play the existing game and try raise the participation cost to whatever we ourselves can bear, so as to exclude lower-status people who can’t pay it. This worked ancestrally because people lived in relatively small groups (much smaller than the average school, let alone the wide world) and didn’t have the freedom to defect from a group and look for new associates elsewhere.
People really care and/or benefit from excluding lower status people from their groups. Your friend pays the cost and goes to the events, but some people simply cannot pay the cost (either in money or in dress-sense or in something else), so they never go to these events. There are social benefits to forming exclusive clubs (in game theoretical terms) which only require that the club be exclusive (doesn’t matter on which basis). For instance, it makes use of us vs. them ingroup/outgroup dynamics to strengthen in-group ties.
If the exclusive group is based on a really worthwhile metric (in evolutionary terms), then people benefit from joining, if only because they get exclusive access to a good pool of potential mates. As another example, if it’s based on money (being able to afford dresses), then it helps rich people network together, which is useful in the future when money becomes a powerful tool for rich people to help one another.
I don’t understand why my question was loaded. You asked why such-and-such cruel behavior existed. I asked, to clarify, why did you consider it cruel? Perhaps the behavior I have a mental image of isn’t what you mean.
I wish I could better understand your reaction to my question, and others’ reactions to my words in general (in the spirit of the current post). So I would appreciate it if you could explain why my question struck you as unpleasant and how I could have gone about it better. Thanks!
Actually, I find this quite useful. I’ve found (before I discovered the following) that those who care enough about status to write me off for not ‘playing the game’ are the same whom I’d rather not associate with; in a sense they self-filter themselves from my life, and I’m much happier for it.
Agreed. Though I don’t think this answer fully solves the whole riddle of why some initiate the game at all.
They are old friends with whom she was out of touch, and with whom she has recently started spending time again. Ironically, she (says she) detests every moment spent with them, as they have little to nothing in common. As to why she cares at all, I’ve not an idea.
I use ‘force’ to refer to how one must play their game when deciding whether they wish to attend the event. Even in deciding to attend and not play the game by wearing a previously owned dress, or not attend and avoid the dilemma entirely, one still makes a decision heavily influenced by the mere existence of the game. As long as one has high-enough status, merely initiating the game forces everyone to play it, as one can’t make a comprehensive decision on whether to attend the event without taking the game into account.
Indeed; however, the event in question (high-school senior prom) is entirely unique to her. School student government changes every year, and thus every year prom changes as well. The cathartic (marking the ending of a personal era) experience of the senior prom adds more to the event as well. Any other generic ‘special event’, though, would not apply—assuming one has previously attended a similar event.
I view such events as both an obligation and an opportunity—different for each party. To use the present example: for my friend, the event is an obligation; as far as can be predicted (not far), she loses more than she gains by attending. For another, though, the event might provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to secure a future with the lovely Sal Crenley. The following table represents my reasoning:
Potential factors numbers two and three have merit, and I’ll keep them in mind to test against future experiences.
I really appreciate your asking the question, and apologize if commenting on my emotional reaction to your question caused you distress. I think, on some level, I realized that you asked a sound question that would take me much time to respond; my aversion to this expenditure of time likely effected an emotional resentment. Why answer at all, then? Rationally, I knew the question needed answering, and would help me learn how to better express myself. The effort would be difficult, but according to my values, worth doing. I would not emotionally enjoy the experience however, and my subconscience resented you for presenting the opportunity for my brain to force itself to do an activity it wouldn’t enjoy.
I particularly appreciate how your question made me realize this—though not until after I’d posted. I used to love mulling the answers to these sorts of questions, but somewhere along the way I seem to have developed a dislike for them, probably due to repeated experience of tediously and verbosely proving an answer to such questions with overlong semantic proofs. Now I know I should neither completely forswear nor righteously pursue unloading these concepts, but should concisely answer them while still avoiding using leaps of logic. Thanks to your question, I can also now work on overwriting the nasty bit of emotional reaction brought on by loaded, difficult questions (the reason for why I perceive such behavior to be cruel had a difficult and complex answer—thus the ‘loaded’ question).
I shared my reaction to your question with you in order to expose any bias that may have affected my logic, and to give you a sense of the mental state your question effected within me. If you knew that asking for clarification on the foundation of a question’s premise might invoke an adverse reaction, then you might be better equipped for handling a similar situation in the future.
Less Wrong’s Markdown implementation doesn’t allow HTML, and there’s no way to do tables in the non-HTML part of Markdown, except for using spaces to separate the columns so that they line up in a fixed-width font, then indenting each line by four spaces.
(Today I learned a new word.)
Ｔｈａｎｋ ｙｏｕ． I used the page source code from the tables in this article to try it previously.
Yeah, posts use HTML but comments use Markdown.