My Status Circles

Most of us have circles of concern, where we care more about folks from our inner circles than our outer circles. And relative to conservatives, liberals care more about their outer circle folks.

Status is a consensus measure of personal worth, and respect, shared by some community. And our status markers also seem to vary with these circles of concern; we respect differently in different circles.

In this post, I want to illustrate this by trying to describe my personal circles and their differing status markers. I suspect this to be a neglected but valuable exercise. By telling the world directly what your community respects, you might induce them to change what they respect, or to join your community.

My widest circle includes all life in the universe. More narrow is all the life that will descend from life on Earth, including AIs. More narrow still are Earth lineages (both DNA and cultural) that I embody and descend from, and which will descend from us. For these wider circles I mostly accept their existing status makers, most of which do point to good things. I do put a bit more weight than most on biological adaptiveness, but otherwise I mainly bother to argue weights re my smaller circles.

The smaller circles for most people include their species and related bio groupings, continents, nations, acquaintances, friends, and family. But I strongly identify as an intellectual, so I focus on intellectual-type circles. I don’t think everyone should be an intellectual, so I don’t want everyone to join this circle, and I want intellectuals and others to respect and complement each other.

In the widest circle of intellectuals, the focus is on “winning” the usual markers by which intellectuals are celebrated in our world. Such as fame, popularity, attention, money, and prestige markers like jobs, publications, keynote talks, etc. Most who win do so via placing most of their weight on winning, both personally and re status.

Relative to such folks, my smaller circles care more about original insight: did someone actually contribute to our world learning more about neglected important topics? That is, we judge contributions by their marginal impact on our total understanding. Yes the two are correlated, but they aren’t the same.

As there is so much variance in individual contributions, someone’s best single contribution is often a good proxy for the magnitude of their total contributions, and it seems much easier to judge. So even though this may induce modest distortions, it often makes sense to focus on a person’s best few contributions.

Yes, there is also value in the world’s intellectuals ensuring that we don’t forget things we once knew, and ensuring that the wider world can access our insights. But given the magnitude of existing efforts into such things, my circle puts more weight on generating insights and communicating them to others who might build on them. (For small practical innovations, the situation is reversed; there diffusion is neglected relative to invention.)

Many intellectuals pursue their efforts as hobbyists and collectors, mostly for the fun of it, to avoid boredom. Many count that motive as higher than those who try to win, but I can only credit that as being a bit less likely to go wrong than win motives often do, via things like mutual admiration societies.

One principle of incentive metrics, including status markers, is that it can sometimes help to put weight on a lower noise proxy which correlates with a higher noise more fundamental value. So if the features of intelligence, knowledge, intellectual honesty, and openness to engaging critics tend to promote intellectual progress, but have less noise to estimate, it can be worth putting status weight on those features directly, for the purpose of promoting and estimating intellectual progress. Yes, there is a danger of putting too much weight on them.

One key proxy on which my circles put more weight is: directly trying to make progress on important neglected topics, based on explicit analysis of this question. Most intellectuals fall into their topics, or cue off of signs of topic profitability, popularity, or prestige. If you ask them directly why their topics are important and neglected, they are mostly surprised to hear the question, and usually make up shallow rationales showing they haven’t considered the question much.

So I very much respect folks who deliberately try to, and successfully do, make progress on important neglected topics. But most of those who have an explicit analysis of why their topics are especially promising did that long ago, and haven’t reconsidered this much since then. My most inner circle is thus reserved for those who keep re-asking this question, and actually change their mind on it over decades.

I have personally found that over my lifetime I learned a great deal about what topics were important and neglected, as I kept digging into them. I found that some apparent problems were really caused more by different underlying problems. And I found that new concepts and frameworks changed what I saw as the most pivotal questions and claims. These weren’t small changes, and I don’t see how to short circuit this process; it happens at the speed of understanding.

My experience seems robust enough that I just can’t believe that it’s very atypical. If you are paying attention, you will change your mind in big ways on what seems how interesting and neglected. And if you act on that, you will substantially change your topics. My inner circle is thus composed of folks who take and respect this stance. As such folks often move across disciplines, they are often called “polymaths”.

So, to summarize, I respect most creatures in the universe according to the usual status markers of their communities, though I put more weight than most on adaptiveness. I see myself as in a smaller circle of intellectuals, wherein we especially respect those who add to the world’s understanding on important things, often proxied by our few biggest contributions.

But as that’s a noisy measure, I’m also in an even smaller circle that puts a modest extra weight on some less noisy proxies, especially: using analysis to continually and directly try to add to important topics, a strategy that typically results in our changing our intellectual efforts in big ways over decades.