I voted this up because it raises a useful background theory that many people might have lurking subconsciously in their head (and which they want not to be true and so they instinctively down vote to drive people who make the claim out of the community—the post was at −3 before I wrote this and voted it up).
(ETA: The comment being responded to appears to have been edited to be more abstract and less colorful. Other than adding this note, my text has not been correspondingly edited.)
In practice, I think this status formula is true in certain communities that assign prestige in certain ways but it is not true in others. Alicorn pointed out that it didn’t apply to her, but the point is worth making that it doesn’t apply to me for similar reasons. This is largely because because we are female, educated, and live in the first world. There are different communities that have different implicit bases for prestige… and some of them do work on physical violence and the treatment of females as something vaguely like chattel slaves and others operate only a few symbolic steps away from this model. (In these communities, you’ll notice that female status and its processes are largely ignored.)
Which situation makes you more conscious of status: when your Pokemon collection is smaller than Bob’s, or when Bob beats you up and takes your girlfriend? To really feel the concept, you have to be close to the monkey life.
Directly and simply, this is clearly not the basis of the status of:
Oprah Winfrey
Warren Buffet
Lady Gaga
Nelson Mandela
Stephanie Meyer
John Stewart
Robin Hanson (in the world and dramatically here)
Alicorn (primarily within this community, so far)
The people enmeshed in communities whose prestige works (for men) on this basis of capacity physical violence are tragic and deserve (where feasible) offers to help them up out of the poverty of “baseline monkeyhood”. The standards for women in such communities are different than for men (and frequently invisible to them), but they are similarly primitive and lead to women to spend the bulk of their lives thinking that their best years are behind them rather than in front of them.
Those communities tend to be “objectively” impoverished in terms of material, culture, and institutions… and they are hard to help in part because any attempt at giving them a hand “up” implies a standard of judgment that sees their current system for allocating prestige as defective and in need of repair (which poses an inherent ego threat to the people who currently “score high” within that framework and have substantial influence).
So, yeah, I think that the status formula that cousin_it succinctly spells out here is functionally true for a significant percentage of the humans on the planet—young impoverished males with few prospects for “upward mobility”. If adults flinch from recognizing this “head on” and then thinking about the implications it does the world a disservice.
I didn’t vote it down, but those that did voted it down because it is wrong. What you describe here I agree with. (At least I agree with the description of circumstance not necessarily the normative claims or predictions of emotional impact on those in question.) But for all ‘capacity to beat you up’ is highly relevant to status it is not the same thing, even in tribes where primitive status competition mechanisms are in place. Coalitions and rights to getting resources or mates without the tribe expelling you are too important even then.
I claim that “capacity to beat you up” is more relevant to status than self-esteem is. To understand the causality here, let’s do some counterfactual surgery on graphs. While you try to modify node A by sitting around for three months trying to raise your self-esteem, I modify node B by hitting the gym and taking boxing lessons for the same time. Then we meet and ascertain which node was more causally relevant!
Of course there’s no need to actually try this experiment because a lot of people have tried it already. For example, I can compare different versions of me at different times, before and after I learned to hold my own in a fight.
Coalitions, mate rights etc. are important, but they have causes too. The ultimate factor that determines your coalition-worthiness or mating-priority is often your projected chance of winning a conflict.
I voted this up because it raises a useful background theory that many people might have lurking subconsciously in their head (and which they want not to be true and so they instinctively down vote to drive people who make the claim out of the community—the post was at −3 before I wrote this and voted it up).
(ETA: The comment being responded to appears to have been edited to be more abstract and less colorful. Other than adding this note, my text has not been correspondingly edited.)
In practice, I think this status formula is true in certain communities that assign prestige in certain ways but it is not true in others. Alicorn pointed out that it didn’t apply to her, but the point is worth making that it doesn’t apply to me for similar reasons. This is largely because because we are female, educated, and live in the first world. There are different communities that have different implicit bases for prestige… and some of them do work on physical violence and the treatment of females as something vaguely like chattel slaves and others operate only a few symbolic steps away from this model. (In these communities, you’ll notice that female status and its processes are largely ignored.)
As cousin_it pointed out in a response to a different comment:
Directly and simply, this is clearly not the basis of the status of:
Oprah Winfrey
Warren Buffet
Lady Gaga
Nelson Mandela
Stephanie Meyer
John Stewart
Robin Hanson (in the world and dramatically here)
Alicorn (primarily within this community, so far)
The people enmeshed in communities whose prestige works (for men) on this basis of capacity physical violence are tragic and deserve (where feasible) offers to help them up out of the poverty of “baseline monkeyhood”. The standards for women in such communities are different than for men (and frequently invisible to them), but they are similarly primitive and lead to women to spend the bulk of their lives thinking that their best years are behind them rather than in front of them.
Those communities tend to be “objectively” impoverished in terms of material, culture, and institutions… and they are hard to help in part because any attempt at giving them a hand “up” implies a standard of judgment that sees their current system for allocating prestige as defective and in need of repair (which poses an inherent ego threat to the people who currently “score high” within that framework and have substantial influence).
So, yeah, I think that the status formula that cousin_it succinctly spells out here is functionally true for a significant percentage of the humans on the planet—young impoverished males with few prospects for “upward mobility”. If adults flinch from recognizing this “head on” and then thinking about the implications it does the world a disservice.
I didn’t vote it down, but those that did voted it down because it is wrong. What you describe here I agree with. (At least I agree with the description of circumstance not necessarily the normative claims or predictions of emotional impact on those in question.) But for all ‘capacity to beat you up’ is highly relevant to status it is not the same thing, even in tribes where primitive status competition mechanisms are in place. Coalitions and rights to getting resources or mates without the tribe expelling you are too important even then.
I claim that “capacity to beat you up” is more relevant to status than self-esteem is. To understand the causality here, let’s do some counterfactual surgery on graphs. While you try to modify node A by sitting around for three months trying to raise your self-esteem, I modify node B by hitting the gym and taking boxing lessons for the same time. Then we meet and ascertain which node was more causally relevant!
Of course there’s no need to actually try this experiment because a lot of people have tried it already. For example, I can compare different versions of me at different times, before and after I learned to hold my own in a fight.
Coalitions, mate rights etc. are important, but they have causes too. The ultimate factor that determines your coalition-worthiness or mating-priority is often your projected chance of winning a conflict.