I recently read Will Storr’s book “The Status Game” based on a LessWrong recommendation by user Wei_Dai. It’s an excellent book, and I highly recommend it.
Storr asserts that we are all playing status games, including meditation gurus and cynics. Then he classifies the different kinds of status games we can play, arguing that “virtue dominance” games are the worst kinds of games, as they are the root of cancel culture.
Storr has a few recommendations for playing the Status Game to result in a positive-sum. First, view other people as being the heroes of their own life stories. If everyone else is the hero of their own story, which character do you want to be in their lives? Of course, you’d like to be a helpful character.
Storr distils what he believes to be “good” status games into three categories. They are:
Warmth: When you are warm, you communicate, “I’m not going to play a dominance game with you.” You imply that the other person will not get threats from you and that they are in a safe place around you.
Sincerity: Sincerity is about levelling with other people and being honest with them. It signals to someone else that you will tell them when things are going badly and when things are going well. You will not be morally unfair to them or allow resentment to build up and then surprise them with a sudden burst of malice.
Competence: Competence is just success and it signals that you can achieve goals and be helpful to the group.
I thought this book offered an interesting perspective on an integral aspect of being a human, status.
The important fact about “zero-sum” games is that they often have externalities. Maybe status is a zero-sum game in the sense that either you are higher-status than me, or the other way round, but there is no way for everyone to be at the top of the status ladder.
However, the choice of “weapons” in our battle matters for the environment. If people can only get higher status by writing good articles, we should expect many good articles to appear. (Or, “good” articles, because goodharting is a thing.) If people can get higher status by punching each other, we should expect to see many people hurt.
According to Adam Smith, the miracle of capitalism is channeling the human instinct of greed into productive projects. (Or, “productive”, because goodharting is a thing.) We should do the same thing for status, somehow. If we could universally make useful things high-status and harmful things low-status, the world would become a paradise. (Or, a “paradise”, because goodharting is a thing.)
How to do that, though? One obvious problem is that you cannot simply set the rules for people to follow, because “breaking rules” is inherently high-status. Can you make cheaters seem like losers, even if it brings them profit (because otherwise, why would they do it)?
Loved your comment, especially the “goodharting” interjections haha.
Your comment reminded me of “building” company culture. Managers keep trying to sculpt a company culture, but in reality managers have limited control over the culture. Company culture is more a thing that happens and evolves, and you as an individual can only do so much to influence it this way or that way.
Similarly, status is a thing that just happens and evolves in human society, and sometimes it has good externalities and other times it has bad externalities.
I quite liked “What You Do Is Who You Are” by Ben Horowitz. I thought it offered a practical perspective on creating company culture by focusing on embodying the values you’d like to see instead of just preaching them and hoping others embody them.
I thought it offered a practical perspective on creating company culture by focusing on embodying the values you’d like to see instead of just preaching them and hoping others embody them.
That sounds like an advice on parenting. What your kids will do, is what they see you doing. Actually no, that would be too easy—your kids will instead do a more stupid version of what they see you doing. Like, you use a swear word once in a month, but then they will keep using it every five minutes.
And, I don’t know, maybe this is where the (steelman of) preaching is useful; to correct the exaggerations. Like, if you swear once in a while, you will probably fail to convince your kids that they should never do that; copying is a strong instinct. But if you tell them “okay kids, polite people shouldn’t be doing this, and yes I do it sometimes, but please notice that it happens only on some days, not repeatedly, and not in front of your grandparents or teachers—could you please follow the same rules?” then maybe at some age this would work. At least it does not involve denying the reality.
And maybe the manager could say something like “we said that we value X, and yes, we had this one project that was quite anti-X, but please notice that most of our projects are actually quite X, this one was an exception, and we will try having fewer of that in the future”. Possibly with a discussion on why that one specific project ended up anti-X, and what we could do to prevent that from happening in the future.
Managers keep trying to sculpt a company culture, but in reality managers have limited control over the culture. Company culture is more a thing that happens and evolves, and you as an individual can only do so much to influence it this way or that way.
Intentionally influencing other people is a skill I lack, so I can only guess here. It seems to me that although no manager actually has the whole company perfectly under control, there are still some more specific failure modes that are quite common:
Some people are obvious bullshitters, and if you are familiar with this type, you just won’t take any of their words seriously. Their lips just produce random syllables that are supposed to increase your productivity, or maybe just signal to their boss that they are working hard to increase your productivity, but the actual meaning of the words is completely divorced from reality. (For example, the managers who regularly give company speeches on the importance of “agile development”, and yet it is obvious that they intend to keep all 666 layers of management, and plan everything 5 years ahead… but now you will have Jira and daily meetings, in addition to all the usual meetings, so at least that will be different.)
Some people seem to actually mean it, but they fail to realize that incentives matter, or that in order to achieve X you actually need to do some Y first, as if the mere act of stating your goal could magically make it true. (For example, the managers who keep talking about how work-life balance is important, and yet all their teams are understaffed, and they keep starting new projects without cancelling the existing ones or hiring more people. Or the managers who tell you to give honest estimates how long something will take, but they consistently punish employees who say that something will take a lot of time, even if they turn out to be right, and reward employees who give short estimates, even if they fail to deliver the expected quality.) Here I am sometimes not sure what is actual incompetence, and what just strategical pretense.
I may be unfair, but the older I get, the more I assume that most dysfunctions at workplace are there by design, not by accident. Not necessarily for the good of the company, but rather for personal benefit of some of its managers, like making their job more convenient, or getting a bonus for bringing short-term profit (that will lead to long-term loss, but someone else will be blamed for that).
Elephant in the Brain influenced extensively ways I perceive social motivations. It is talking exactly about the same subject and mechanisms of why we don’t discern it in ourselves. If you didn’t read it you should check it out. It rewrote my views to the extent that I feel afraid to read “The status game” because it feels so easy to fall into confirmation bias here. This seems to me so active that I would love to read something opposite. Are there any good critiques of this view? Once I was listening to Frans de Waal’s lecture when he expressed this confusion that in primatology almost everything is explained through the hierarchy in the group. But when we listen to social scientists almost none of it is. Elephant in the brain. I think this is such an important topic.
I recently read Will Storr’s book “The Status Game” based on a LessWrong recommendation by user Wei_Dai. It’s an excellent book, and I highly recommend it.
Storr asserts that we are all playing status games, including meditation gurus and cynics. Then he classifies the different kinds of status games we can play, arguing that “virtue dominance” games are the worst kinds of games, as they are the root of cancel culture.
Storr has a few recommendations for playing the Status Game to result in a positive-sum. First, view other people as being the heroes of their own life stories. If everyone else is the hero of their own story, which character do you want to be in their lives? Of course, you’d like to be a helpful character.
Storr distils what he believes to be “good” status games into three categories. They are:
Warmth: When you are warm, you communicate, “I’m not going to play a dominance game with you.” You imply that the other person will not get threats from you and that they are in a safe place around you.
Sincerity: Sincerity is about levelling with other people and being honest with them. It signals to someone else that you will tell them when things are going badly and when things are going well. You will not be morally unfair to them or allow resentment to build up and then surprise them with a sudden burst of malice.
Competence: Competence is just success and it signals that you can achieve goals and be helpful to the group.
I thought this book offered an interesting perspective on an integral aspect of being a human, status.
The important fact about “zero-sum” games is that they often have externalities. Maybe status is a zero-sum game in the sense that either you are higher-status than me, or the other way round, but there is no way for everyone to be at the top of the status ladder.
However, the choice of “weapons” in our battle matters for the environment. If people can only get higher status by writing good articles, we should expect many good articles to appear. (Or, “good” articles, because goodharting is a thing.) If people can get higher status by punching each other, we should expect to see many people hurt.
According to Adam Smith, the miracle of capitalism is channeling the human instinct of greed into productive projects. (Or, “productive”, because goodharting is a thing.) We should do the same thing for status, somehow. If we could universally make useful things high-status and harmful things low-status, the world would become a paradise. (Or, a “paradise”, because goodharting is a thing.)
How to do that, though? One obvious problem is that you cannot simply set the rules for people to follow, because “breaking rules” is inherently high-status. Can you make cheaters seem like losers, even if it brings them profit (because otherwise, why would they do it)?
Loved your comment, especially the “goodharting” interjections haha.
Your comment reminded me of “building” company culture. Managers keep trying to sculpt a company culture, but in reality managers have limited control over the culture. Company culture is more a thing that happens and evolves, and you as an individual can only do so much to influence it this way or that way.
Similarly, status is a thing that just happens and evolves in human society, and sometimes it has good externalities and other times it has bad externalities.
I quite liked “What You Do Is Who You Are” by Ben Horowitz. I thought it offered a practical perspective on creating company culture by focusing on embodying the values you’d like to see instead of just preaching them and hoping others embody them.
That sounds like an advice on parenting. What your kids will do, is what they see you doing. Actually no, that would be too easy—your kids will instead do a more stupid version of what they see you doing. Like, you use a swear word once in a month, but then they will keep using it every five minutes.
And, I don’t know, maybe this is where the (steelman of) preaching is useful; to correct the exaggerations. Like, if you swear once in a while, you will probably fail to convince your kids that they should never do that; copying is a strong instinct. But if you tell them “okay kids, polite people shouldn’t be doing this, and yes I do it sometimes, but please notice that it happens only on some days, not repeatedly, and not in front of your grandparents or teachers—could you please follow the same rules?” then maybe at some age this would work. At least it does not involve denying the reality.
And maybe the manager could say something like “we said that we value X, and yes, we had this one project that was quite anti-X, but please notice that most of our projects are actually quite X, this one was an exception, and we will try having fewer of that in the future”. Possibly with a discussion on why that one specific project ended up anti-X, and what we could do to prevent that from happening in the future.
Intentionally influencing other people is a skill I lack, so I can only guess here. It seems to me that although no manager actually has the whole company perfectly under control, there are still some more specific failure modes that are quite common:
Some people are obvious bullshitters, and if you are familiar with this type, you just won’t take any of their words seriously. Their lips just produce random syllables that are supposed to increase your productivity, or maybe just signal to their boss that they are working hard to increase your productivity, but the actual meaning of the words is completely divorced from reality. (For example, the managers who regularly give company speeches on the importance of “agile development”, and yet it is obvious that they intend to keep all 666 layers of management, and plan everything 5 years ahead… but now you will have Jira and daily meetings, in addition to all the usual meetings, so at least that will be different.)
Some people seem to actually mean it, but they fail to realize that incentives matter, or that in order to achieve X you actually need to do some Y first, as if the mere act of stating your goal could magically make it true. (For example, the managers who keep talking about how work-life balance is important, and yet all their teams are understaffed, and they keep starting new projects without cancelling the existing ones or hiring more people. Or the managers who tell you to give honest estimates how long something will take, but they consistently punish employees who say that something will take a lot of time, even if they turn out to be right, and reward employees who give short estimates, even if they fail to deliver the expected quality.) Here I am sometimes not sure what is actual incompetence, and what just strategical pretense.
I may be unfair, but the older I get, the more I assume that most dysfunctions at workplace are there by design, not by accident. Not necessarily for the good of the company, but rather for personal benefit of some of its managers, like making their job more convenient, or getting a bonus for bringing short-term profit (that will lead to long-term loss, but someone else will be blamed for that).
Elephant in the Brain influenced extensively ways I perceive social motivations. It is talking exactly about the same subject and mechanisms of why we don’t discern it in ourselves. If you didn’t read it you should check it out. It rewrote my views to the extent that I feel afraid to read “The status game” because it feels so easy to fall into confirmation bias here. This seems to me so active that I would love to read something opposite. Are there any good critiques of this view? Once I was listening to Frans de Waal’s lecture when he expressed this confusion that in primatology almost everything is explained through the hierarchy in the group. But when we listen to social scientists almost none of it is. Elephant in the brain. I think this is such an important topic.
I’ve read “The Elephant in the Brain”, and it was certainly a breathtaking read. I should read it again.