Tag Archives: Status

Political Puzzles

By Robin Hanson · November 12, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (19)

Some puzzling political phenomena I’ve pondered lately:

  1. We trust government more when we feel vulnerable to it, and then avoid info that might undermine such trust.
  2. We don’t elect actors and other celebrities, who we seem to trust, respect, like, know, etc. more than the politicians we elect.
  3. We think we’d be horrified live under a king, but quite enjoy stories set in such places.
  4. We over-estimate leader autonomy, neglecting their need to serve supporting coalitions.

We love to look down on submissive sheep who accept domination by the powerful. And we think of ourselves as quite different, eager to control our leaders via democracy, and to keep them from becoming kings. Some of our actions even fit well with this story. But many other actions fit badly.

I hypothesize that much of this hails from our homo hypocritus heritage. Humans developed language to express and enforce social norms, most importantly to limit domination and related supporting behavior, such as bragging. But then foragers quickly learned to dominate and submit covertly, just out of reach of language-based norm enforcement. So we should expect to have many complex, subtle, and mostly unconscious capacities to dominate and submit, while pretending otherwise.

Thus we should expect to see people giving lip service to resisting domination, while largely accepting it when resistance is costly. We should be prone to telling ourselves that our dominators serve our interests well, when in fact we are just scared of being beaten down. We tell ourselves that our leaders’ power is solid, even when we notice cracks, to avoid appearing disloyal. And we tell ourselves that we want likable leaders, when we are actually more impressed by strength. Homo hypocritus cowers in a corner, pretending to examine a spot on the ground.

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Accepted Inequality

By Robin Hanson · November 11, 2011 8:40 am · Comments (29)

David Brooks reviews socially acceptable vs. unacceptable ways to display one’s superiority. Some accepted forms:

Academic inequality is socially acceptable. It is perfectly fine to demonstrate that you are in the academic top 1 percent by wearing a Princeton, Harvard or Stanford sweatshirt. …

Fitness inequality is acceptable. It is perfectly fine to wear tight workout sweats to show the world that pilates have given you buns of steel. These sorts of displays are welcomed as evidence of your commendable self-discipline and reproductive merit. …

Sports inequality is acceptable. It is normal to wear a Yankees jersey, an L.S.U. T-shirt or the emblem of any big budget team. The fact that your favorite sports franchise regularly grounds opponents into dust is a signal of your overall prowess. …

Technological inequality is acceptable. If you are the sort of person who understands the latest hardware and software advances, who knows the latest apps, it is acceptable to lord your superior connoisseurship over the aged relics who do not understand these things. (more; HT Tyler)

A world that disapproves of most all superiority displays could be one with a distaste for overt inequality, and sympathy for the less fortunate. In contrast, a world that disapproves of only some superiority displays while relishing others looks more like a world where folks with some types of excellence have won a battle to be seen as higher status than folks with other types of excellence.

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Status Drives Poverty?

By Robin Hanson · November 3, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (24)

A book on poor single moms, discussing why moms break up with guys:

Conflicts over money do not usually erupt simply because the man cannot find a job or because he doesn’t earn as much as someone with better skills or education.  Money usually becomes an issue because he seems unwilling to keep at a job for any length of time, usually because of issues related to respect.  Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss. (more; HT Bryan)

I suspect much of what makes some cultures more successful than others is how they help folks to avoid seeing unpleasant interactions as direct challenges to their status.

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A Theory Of Status

By Robin Hanson · October 14, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (10)

A few days ago I asked for a theory of status, to help predict how status will change in a rather different future. Today let me offer such a theory.

Here are our main clues about status:

  1. Status is a socially shared way to evaluate and rank people
  2. Status seems mostly relative; you can’t raise everyone’s status
  3. Human status has two main parts: dominance and prestige
  4. Most animals have dominance, which is who would win a pairwise conflict
  5. Prestige status seems to not exist in animals with simple social relations.
  6. Unlike other shared rankings, like sexiness or dominance, we seem unaware of what exactly prestige ranks.

So what is prestige? That is, what sort of ranking would be useful for human-like primates to track about each other, but also be something illicit, so that foragers would be reluctant to admit its true function? One obvious candidate stands out to me: one’s value as an ally in coalition politics. That is, how much better off is a typical coalition with this person as an ally, relative to not having them as an ally. This is clearly an important concept, well worth tracking. It only makes sense in groups with complex coalition politics, and foragers have norms against overtly engaging in such politics.

Since an ability to win pairwise contests is useful to coalitions, we expect dominance to add to prestige. But humans and similar primates can also add value to a coalition by having skills that make them useful associates, and by being on good terms with other good-ally-material folks. And both skills and associations also seem to make important contributions to human prestige. Note that this theory predicts that other primates with complex coalition politics, like chimps, will also have a prestige status distinct from dominance status.

If prestige is about one’s value in coalition politics, what does that predict about em prestige? Of the list I gave, items 2,5,7,12,16, should be substantially related to prestige.

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What Status Ems?

By Robin Hanson · October 12, 2011 6:50 pm · Comments (16)

While many things count for status in our society, most of us have a rough idea of their relative weight, at least for common evaluations. But we understand the origins of these weights poorly. This ignorance seems especially clear when we consider how status might change in the future. For example, I’ve been pondering the scenario of a future world dominated by ems (whole brain emulations), and realize that it seems especially unclear what would count more for status among ems. Some possibilities:

  1. Pure physical size or power
  2. Impressiveness in conversation or verbal sparring
  3. How well its personality embodies the ideals of its age
  4. How mental, complex, or abstract is its job
  5. # other statusful ems this em commands or controls
  6. The accomplishments of this copy, since its last split.
  7. # other high status ems know it personally
  8. Political influence of this em in local disputes
  9. Personal em wealth
  10. Current daily wages
  11. Current daily profit, of wages minus cost to exist
  12. The status its human had in the pre-em world
  13. Total time this mind has experienced subjectively
  14. Time expected until em forced to retire/archive
  15. # active copies expected of this em at a future date
  16. # active “clan” copies, all of the same pre-em human
  17. # active copies expected of this clan at a future date
  18. The total accomplishments of the entire copy clan
  19. # other high status ems know anyone in clan
  20. Total wealth of its copy clan
  21. Total potential political influence of its copy clan

Of course if we had a good theory of status, we could use that to predict future status. For example, if status were a measure of future evolutionary success, then #15 would make sense. But if status were instead a measure of the value of an ally in local coalition politics, then #8 would make more sense.

Many of these measures (e.g., #14) could produce an abrupt change in status when a new copy is created. Do abrupt status changes make sense when others’ opinions about you haven’t changed?

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Historical Heresy

By Robin Hanson · October 9, 2011 10:00 pm · Comments (19)

Famed Historian Angus Deaton:

It is sometimes supposed … that rich people have always lived healthier and longer lives than poor people. That this supposition is generally false is vividly shown by Harris who compares the life expectancies at birth of the general population in England with that of [rich] ducal families. From the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 19th century, there was little obvious trend in general life expectancy. For the ducal families up to 1750, life expectancy was no higher than, and sometimes lower than, the life expectancy of the general population. However, during the century after 1750, the life prospects of the aristocrats pulled away from those of the general population, and by 1850–74, they had an advantage of about 20 years. After 1850, the modern increase in life expectancy became established in the general population. Johansson tells a similar story for the British royals compared to the general population, though the royals began with an even lower life expectancy at birth. …

Men die at higher rates than women at all ages after conception. Although women around the world report higher morbidity [= sickness] than men, their mortality [= death] rates are usually around half of those of men. … Women get sick and men get dead. … Biology cannot be the whole explanation. The female advantage in life expectancy in the US is now smaller than for many years, 5.3 years in 2008 compared with 7.8 years in 1979, and it has been argued that there was little or no differential in the preindustrial world. The contemporary decline in female advantage is largely driven by cigarette smoking; women were slower to start smoking than men, and have been slower to quit. (more)

This is a provocative hypothesis, but I don’t believe it. That is, I don’t believe that in general status and gender were unrelated to mortality until the industrial revolution. Chimp females live longer than chimp males, and I’ll bet that holds for foragers too. I’ll also bet that in both chimps and foragers high status tends to correlate with lower mortality.

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We See Dominance

By Robin Hanson · October 7, 2011 10:00 pm · Comments (1)

Foragers might have spend a million years enforcing egalitarian rules against overt dominance, but our capacities for seeing dominance are still quite central to our nature:

We tested the hypothesis that social hierarchies are fluent social stimuli; that is, they are processed more easily and therefore liked better than less hierarchical stimuli. In Study 1, pairs of people in a hierarchy based on facial dominance were identified faster than pairs of people equal in their facial dominance. In Study 2, a diagram representing hierarchy was memorized more quickly than a diagram representing equality or a comparison diagram. This faster processing led the hierarchy diagram to be liked more than the equality diagram. In Study 3, participants were best able to learn a set of relationships that represented hierarchy (asymmetry of power)—compared to relationships in which there was asymmetry of friendliness, or compared to relationships in which there was symmetry—and this processing ease led them to like the hierarchy the most. In Study 4, participants found it easier to make decisions about a company that was more hierarchical and thus thought the hierarchical organization had more positive qualities. In Study 5, familiarity as a basis for the fluency of hierarchy was demonstrated by showing greater fluency for male than female hierarchies. This study also showed that when social relationships are difficult to learn, people’s preference for hierarchy increases. Taken together, these results suggest one reason people might like hierarchies—hierarchies are easy to process. This fluency for social hierarchies might contribute to the construction and maintenance of hierarchies. (more)

More evidence for the homo hypocritus hypothesis that covert dominance was central to forager lives.

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Parent Vs. Kid Status

By Robin Hanson · October 6, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (22)

When parents have a choice between making they or their kids look good, they pick themselves:

The often-dreaded parent-teacher conference … seems to be an evaluation of student performance, [but] is more often than not an evaluation of the parent and the teacher, by each other. …

Instead of defending their children, parents are consistently critical about their children when talking with teachers, often delivering unsolicited, negative information about them. “Parents … [are] showing that they already know about their children’s potential or actual troubles, displaying that they are fair appraisers of their own children, willing and able to detect and articulate their flaws, and reporting on their own efforts to improve or remedy their children’s faults, shortcomings or problems,” …

Teachers regularly work to encourage parents to be first to articulate critical assessments of the student, such as by asking for the parent’s perspective, observations, questions, and/or concerns about the student’s progress. … Teachers … [then provide] face-saving accounts on students’ behalf (e.g. “That’s not atypical of kids”; “For a 12-year-old boy, normal is pretty flaky.”) … “It is the teacher who consistently works to end the parent-teacher conference interaction on a positive note, delivering future-oriented, favorable or optimistic comments about the student.” (more; HT Eric Barker)

Yet another example of parents caring for kids less than they claim.

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‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag

By Robin Hanson · October 5, 2011 10:40 pm · Comments (79)

From a famous Steve Jobs Stanford graduation address:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. (more; HT Alex)

Now try to imagine a world where everyone actually tried to follow this advice. And notice that we have an awful lot of things that need doing that are unlikely to be anyone’s dream job. So a few folks would be really happy, but most everyone else wouldn’t stay long on any job, and most stuff would get done pretty badly. Not a pretty scenario.

OK, now imagine that only graduates from colleges like Stanford or better followed this advice. Since such folks have more fulfilling job options, a larger fraction of them would end up really happy. But we’d still have too much job turnover among our elites, with too much stuff done badly.

Now notice: doing what you love, and never settling until you find it, is a costly signal of your career prospects. Since following this advice tends to go better for really capable people, they pay a smaller price for following it. So endorsing this strategy in a way that makes you more likely to follow it is a way to signal your status.

It sure feels good to tell people that you think it is important to “do what you love”; and doing so signals your status. You are in effect bragging. Don’t you think there might be some relation between these two facts?

Added: Will Wilkinson, Arnold Kling and Megan McArdle weigh in.

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Advising For Status

By Robin Hanson · October 3, 2011 6:00 pm · Comments (9)

It seems to me that people tend to ask their associates for advice too little, at least relative to the goal of improving their decisions. One key explanation: associates get mad when we don’t follow their advice:

We study the effect of participative decision making in an experimental principal agent game, where the principal can consult the agent’s preferred option regarding the task to be undertaken in the final stage of the game. We show that consulting the agent was beneficial to principals as long as they followed the agent’s choice. Ignoring the agent’s choice was detrimental to the principal as it engendered negative emotions and low levels of transfers. Nevertheless, the majority of principals were reluctant to change their mind and adopt the agent’s proposal. Our results suggest that the ability to change one’s own mind is an important dimension of managerial success. (more; HT Dan Houser)

Giving advice seems to confer status, at least if the advice is followed. Which helps explain why so much unwanted advice is offered.

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