I completely disagree, stating that a person has status-seeking as a motivation makes some very clear predictions. For instance, we’d expect such a person to care very much about having their contributions recognized in front of their work peers, and we’d expect an event like a manager mentioning their idea in a meeting without giving them due credit to be very annoying to them. Conversely, if you observe someone who doesn’t seem too bothered by not having their contributions recognized, you can state with high certainty that they are not seeking status. You’d also expect a status-seeking person to mention their accomplishments on occasion, if you see someone who never mentions any of their accomplishments to anyone, that is evidence that they are not seeking status.
In general “status among humans” is very low-entropy, you don’t have much status in most possible worlds, and you need to exert optimization pressure to steer the future towards the world where you do. I think the mistake you’re making is equating “status = a human’s value function”, in which case the statement “humans maximize status” is equivalent to “humans behave according to their value function”, which becomes tautological. But status does not capture the entirety of a human’s value function, for instance, I care about being happy independently of having high status, I’d prefer both, but status is not enough.
When people talk about status seeking they can mean either boring idea, that it’s one of the motivations people have and some people are more obsessed with status than others, or new and exciting idea that all human behaviour is essentially status seeking. I agree that the boring idea of status seeking has its predictive power. What I wanted to talk about, and I’m sorry that I failed to specify it good enough, is that the new and exciting idea of status seeking just gives mysterious answer while trying to look as if it’s the same idea. And their conflation is where the problems come from.
There is this whole framework of looking at human behaviour from the status seeking perspective and seeing only status games. Something akin always searching for highter simulacrum level meaning of a statement. It’s not immediately clear that using it is a bad idea. After all people do seem to seek status. And people who believe there is a lion on the other side of the river do tend not to want to go there, and tend to be part of not-going-accross-the-river group. But applying this framework ruins our ability to talk about objective level questions and this is a problem.
I completely disagree, stating that a person has status-seeking as a motivation makes some very clear predictions. For instance, we’d expect such a person to care very much about having their contributions recognized in front of their work peers, and we’d expect an event like a manager mentioning their idea in a meeting without giving them due credit to be very annoying to them. Conversely, if you observe someone who doesn’t seem too bothered by not having their contributions recognized, you can state with high certainty that they are not seeking status. You’d also expect a status-seeking person to mention their accomplishments on occasion, if you see someone who never mentions any of their accomplishments to anyone, that is evidence that they are not seeking status.
In general “status among humans” is very low-entropy, you don’t have much status in most possible worlds, and you need to exert optimization pressure to steer the future towards the world where you do. I think the mistake you’re making is equating “status = a human’s value function”, in which case the statement “humans maximize status” is equivalent to “humans behave according to their value function”, which becomes tautological. But status does not capture the entirety of a human’s value function, for instance, I care about being happy independently of having high status, I’d prefer both, but status is not enough.
When people talk about status seeking they can mean either boring idea, that it’s one of the motivations people have and some people are more obsessed with status than others, or new and exciting idea that all human behaviour is essentially status seeking. I agree that the boring idea of status seeking has its predictive power. What I wanted to talk about, and I’m sorry that I failed to specify it good enough, is that the new and exciting idea of status seeking just gives mysterious answer while trying to look as if it’s the same idea. And their conflation is where the problems come from.
There is this whole framework of looking at human behaviour from the status seeking perspective and seeing only status games. Something akin always searching for highter simulacrum level meaning of a statement. It’s not immediately clear that using it is a bad idea. After all people do seem to seek status. And people who believe there is a lion on the other side of the river do tend not to want to go there, and tend to be part of not-going-accross-the-river group. But applying this framework ruins our ability to talk about objective level questions and this is a problem.