kindness and morality also work locally to build reciprocal alliances within one's ingroup or even in partnership with friends or with family members. This can be called simply reputation, smaller scale than prestige
Mostly, yes, because communication was always direct or word-of-mouth. Many small-scale societies had social tools to maintain flattened hiearchy, like wealth shaming; the evil eye; cultural 'memes' that we would call 'anti-progress' or effort-suppressing beliefs (Henrich).
Power differentials were weak prior to agriculture, but then exploded (think the Pyramids). But, you just made me realize something. Regarding my comment that in premodern times, prestige had to be spread vocally by persons. Not true. The pyramids advertised the power of the Egyptian monarchs as far as the eye could see, and then information could be transmitted by everyone who could see those astonishing structures. So -- this helps explain why premodern leaders devoted so many resources into constructing visible advertisements of power, and why monument building is less needed today.
True about the pyramids and other monuments. But if humans have been around about 100,000 years, then the pyramids and later represent only about 5% of our existence.
Yep. So modern life is highly mismatched from the environment and exigencies that held during human evolution. The field that studies this is called evolutionary mismatch.
"Power is...influence"? So status is not power? If "Prestige is a reputation for making product" and "Status is a reputation for admirability." Why are beautiful people or poets usually high in prestige status? Why can charismatic strangers in plain clothes immediately be high status when they enter a room, even without any reputation or status markers? Isn't a "big-shot" high in prestige status?
I have difficulty following implications of your terminology. The discussion about status is muddled by the lack of clear terms. My attempt to clear things a bit up: I define status as the potential to influence the behavior of other people.
Status can be obtained in two basic ways. Dominance – by subduing others – using force or the threat of force. The behavior is influenced by the threat of causing harm (costs). It is based on the submission of the other party in the hope of avoiding further harm from conflict (costs).
Prestige status is based on a person’s competence, ingenuity, and superior characteristics: such as size (height and muscularity), beauty, skills, knowledge, bravery, social and networking skills, verbal ability, entertaining ability, entrepreneurship, leadership. The behavior of others is altered by awe, admiration, and expectation of benefits to be gained by deferring. These can take many forms such as access to mates, goods, services, knowledge & information coordination, leadership, and gaining status through association. The resulting cooperation from prestige is based on voluntarily conferred deference.
Dominance status is “push”, prestige status is “pull”. Dominance creates subordinates, prestige creates followers. Dominant individuals are avoided by subordinates. Prestigious individuals are sought out by their followers, who want to be near them and pay the high-status individual with attention and other services and goods.
The same feature can play a role in different status strategies. In today’s modern societies, the hypertrophied human muscles built in gyms are mostly not meant for dyadic physical confrontation, but for show. They are now a signal of prestige rather than dominance.
Although using distinct psychological structures, different behavioral patterns, and ethological displays prestige has the same origin as dominance – striving to influence the behavior of others. When thinking about prestige and dominance status in terms of potential gains (prestige) and the threat of incurring costs (dominance), one must keep in mind that the price of a particular behavior (cost) is defined by the foregone profit of the second-best alternative not chosen (opportunity cost). Thus, prestige and dominance are just names for strategies in the same status economy, and one cannot clearly separate them. For example, a prestigious individual’s refusal to accept deference from and associate with a follower imposes costs on the follower, so it is strictly a dominance status move. Or the prestigious individual sometimes becomes a protector of lower status followers from other dominant individuals, so the use of prestige status in this case is a dominance tactic. Prestige and dominance are two different strategies with the same goal – to maximize status (influence).
Yes, therefore in the modern human society the best definition of dominance seems to be: The submission of the other party through the imposition of costs or the threat of them. Use of "power" is confusing as people associate with the word different kinds of behaviors and it mixes dominance and prestige status strategies.
The behavior I described in this post happens for other kinds of power than the narrow kind you want to focus on. Which is why I used this more general concept.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
You've defined Power here as the capacity to effect change, and Product as desirable outcomes. Prestige is the reputation for having a good Power-to-Product ratio.
Reputation is measurable, and—as we all know—"what gets measured gets improved". Prestige, having become a target for optimization, stops being a good measure. You're describing this effect as Corruption.
Okay, but it's not Power that's generating the Corruption, it's the optimization process itself. Human-like intelligence trends towards the naive optimization of narrow metrics, begetting Goodhart's Law.
Erroneously concluding that Power is the corrupting element risks targeting powerlessness, and invoking the optimization process all over again. The way human beings accomplish tasks and solve problems—fundamentally—is the issue.
"Power" as you define it seems overly broad as an explanatory factor. for the corruption of prestige. Uncoordinated corruption doesn't lead to systemic misattribution of credit, because different corrupt people can easily be given an adequate incentive to catch each other. Coordinated corruption is explainable by a narrow subset of what you're calling power: factional loyalty. The other aspects of power are generally employed to coordinate misattribution of credit only when the people with those sorts of power are motivated by factional loyalty and therefore perceive a common interest in misattributing credit. And in other cases, they're positive goods since they represent potentially productive capacities, while factional loyalty is not good in itself.
You said I should have used a more narrow concept of "power". I say the behavior I describe happens for the wider concept, not just the narrower version.
I didn't say to use a narrower concept of power. I said that 'power' as you define it is a poor explanation because the various forms of power you describe only lead to systemic credit misattribution when people coordinate through factional loyalty. Without that coordination, individual credit-grabbers get caught.
"Power is the ability to influence people and things, via strength, weapons, money, position, looks, charisma, “a way with words”, etc."
It is common to conflate power and influence in this way. But doing so is failing to distinguish a stick from a carrot. The state, in particular, has power over people in that it can force them to do what it commands. Those without such power can only attempt to influence people by means that do not override their liberty (unless those means are fraudulent).
I hate the fact that 'power' has become thoroughly corrupted by a leftist framing (group-based, oppressor/oppressed). EVERYONE has power in certain situations. The groups/ideas that we pretend are powerful often are not, while the ones we ignore tend to be very powerful.
In this worldview, prestige and status are ignored altogether... even though they're immensely important.
Enjoyed this way of looking at these terms. But where do you fit kindness and morality into the equation?
Kindness and morality are kinds of product that earn one prestige. And for which the powerful try to take credit.
I think the powerful have a hard time taking credit for those particular "products."
kindness and morality also work locally to build reciprocal alliances within one's ingroup or even in partnership with friends or with family members. This can be called simply reputation, smaller scale than prestige
Your comment made me think that for 99%+ of the time that humans have been around, reputation and prestige as you’ve well defined them were identical.
Mostly, yes, because communication was always direct or word-of-mouth. Many small-scale societies had social tools to maintain flattened hiearchy, like wealth shaming; the evil eye; cultural 'memes' that we would call 'anti-progress' or effort-suppressing beliefs (Henrich).
Power differentials were weak prior to agriculture, but then exploded (think the Pyramids). But, you just made me realize something. Regarding my comment that in premodern times, prestige had to be spread vocally by persons. Not true. The pyramids advertised the power of the Egyptian monarchs as far as the eye could see, and then information could be transmitted by everyone who could see those astonishing structures. So -- this helps explain why premodern leaders devoted so many resources into constructing visible advertisements of power, and why monument building is less needed today.
True about the pyramids and other monuments. But if humans have been around about 100,000 years, then the pyramids and later represent only about 5% of our existence.
Yep. So modern life is highly mismatched from the environment and exigencies that held during human evolution. The field that studies this is called evolutionary mismatch.
"Power is...influence"? So status is not power? If "Prestige is a reputation for making product" and "Status is a reputation for admirability." Why are beautiful people or poets usually high in prestige status? Why can charismatic strangers in plain clothes immediately be high status when they enter a room, even without any reputation or status markers? Isn't a "big-shot" high in prestige status?
I have difficulty following implications of your terminology. The discussion about status is muddled by the lack of clear terms. My attempt to clear things a bit up: I define status as the potential to influence the behavior of other people.
Status can be obtained in two basic ways. Dominance – by subduing others – using force or the threat of force. The behavior is influenced by the threat of causing harm (costs). It is based on the submission of the other party in the hope of avoiding further harm from conflict (costs).
Prestige status is based on a person’s competence, ingenuity, and superior characteristics: such as size (height and muscularity), beauty, skills, knowledge, bravery, social and networking skills, verbal ability, entertaining ability, entrepreneurship, leadership. The behavior of others is altered by awe, admiration, and expectation of benefits to be gained by deferring. These can take many forms such as access to mates, goods, services, knowledge & information coordination, leadership, and gaining status through association. The resulting cooperation from prestige is based on voluntarily conferred deference.
Dominance status is “push”, prestige status is “pull”. Dominance creates subordinates, prestige creates followers. Dominant individuals are avoided by subordinates. Prestigious individuals are sought out by their followers, who want to be near them and pay the high-status individual with attention and other services and goods.
The same feature can play a role in different status strategies. In today’s modern societies, the hypertrophied human muscles built in gyms are mostly not meant for dyadic physical confrontation, but for show. They are now a signal of prestige rather than dominance.
Although using distinct psychological structures, different behavioral patterns, and ethological displays prestige has the same origin as dominance – striving to influence the behavior of others. When thinking about prestige and dominance status in terms of potential gains (prestige) and the threat of incurring costs (dominance), one must keep in mind that the price of a particular behavior (cost) is defined by the foregone profit of the second-best alternative not chosen (opportunity cost). Thus, prestige and dominance are just names for strategies in the same status economy, and one cannot clearly separate them. For example, a prestigious individual’s refusal to accept deference from and associate with a follower imposes costs on the follower, so it is strictly a dominance status move. Or the prestigious individual sometimes becomes a protector of lower status followers from other dominant individuals, so the use of prestige status in this case is a dominance tactic. Prestige and dominance are two different strategies with the same goal – to maximize status (influence).
https://www.jurajkarpis.com/moneyisstatusmemory/
There are many kinds of power besides "force or the threat of force".
Yes, therefore in the modern human society the best definition of dominance seems to be: The submission of the other party through the imposition of costs or the threat of them. Use of "power" is confusing as people associate with the word different kinds of behaviors and it mixes dominance and prestige status strategies.
The behavior I described in this post happens for other kinds of power than the narrow kind you want to focus on. Which is why I used this more general concept.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
You've defined Power here as the capacity to effect change, and Product as desirable outcomes. Prestige is the reputation for having a good Power-to-Product ratio.
Reputation is measurable, and—as we all know—"what gets measured gets improved". Prestige, having become a target for optimization, stops being a good measure. You're describing this effect as Corruption.
Okay, but it's not Power that's generating the Corruption, it's the optimization process itself. Human-like intelligence trends towards the naive optimization of narrow metrics, begetting Goodhart's Law.
Erroneously concluding that Power is the corrupting element risks targeting powerlessness, and invoking the optimization process all over again. The way human beings accomplish tasks and solve problems—fundamentally—is the issue.
"Power" as you define it seems overly broad as an explanatory factor. for the corruption of prestige. Uncoordinated corruption doesn't lead to systemic misattribution of credit, because different corrupt people can easily be given an adequate incentive to catch each other. Coordinated corruption is explainable by a narrow subset of what you're calling power: factional loyalty. The other aspects of power are generally employed to coordinate misattribution of credit only when the people with those sorts of power are motivated by factional loyalty and therefore perceive a common interest in misattributing credit. And in other cases, they're positive goods since they represent potentially productive capacities, while factional loyalty is not good in itself.
There are a great many ways for the various powers I listed to coordinate.
Are you attributing agency to the powers themselves rather than people who have various capacities?
no
Then what do you mean by ‘the various powers […] coordinate’? I have no idea what you could mean that’s substantively responsive to my comment.
You said I should have used a more narrow concept of "power". I say the behavior I describe happens for the wider concept, not just the narrower version.
I didn't say to use a narrower concept of power. I said that 'power' as you define it is a poor explanation because the various forms of power you describe only lead to systemic credit misattribution when people coordinate through factional loyalty. Without that coordination, individual credit-grabbers get caught.
"Power is the ability to influence people and things, via strength, weapons, money, position, looks, charisma, “a way with words”, etc."
It is common to conflate power and influence in this way. But doing so is failing to distinguish a stick from a carrot. The state, in particular, has power over people in that it can force them to do what it commands. Those without such power can only attempt to influence people by means that do not override their liberty (unless those means are fraudulent).
There are of course many distinctions one make make near these topics. I pointed to the one I cared about for my purposes here.
So as a manager how much credit should you steal? I suppose the more you will move around the more you you should steal
I hate the fact that 'power' has become thoroughly corrupted by a leftist framing (group-based, oppressor/oppressed). EVERYONE has power in certain situations. The groups/ideas that we pretend are powerful often are not, while the ones we ignore tend to be very powerful.
In this worldview, prestige and status are ignored altogether... even though they're immensely important.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/theory-vs-practice-vs-power
Yes prestige itself gives one some power. Even so, the concepts are distinctly useful.