Education reformers find it harder to change classes for younger students, as later classes depend on earlier classes, and still later classes depend on those.
This is probably the best post I've seen on this blog, and that's because this is a fundamental problem that doesn't only touch status. By the way, this is the sort of argument one should be making when debating the efficacy of medicine(I'm thinking back to that Scott/Robin exchange a few months back on this). Especially psychiatry, if the authorities decide what mental health is, then there's a self-serving feedback loop that happens where the mental profiles of the authorities rig the conception of mental health. That's what is not factored into something like psychiatry and the system is not checked/balanced around this problem. Psychiatry simply has a birth point, the culture/mental profiles of those people influence the field, the field influences reality, and then this continues to feed into itself and not really create a meaningful/deep enough concept of mental health, rather one that's obviously in infancy.
Bad incentives further rig things with respect to things like bad drugs/bad treatments(it has only been decades since lobotomies)-- the assumption is never, "The model is wrong", the assumption is, "The patient, who is broken, isn't responding to the treatment" until there's some measurable response. "Results" here (which I argue aren't very meaningful) are almost always superficial and never capture deeper problems. Things are "disorders" for the most proximate(and therefore brittle, superficial, low-meaning) reasons, and not because say, the world is kind of hellish and the species itself is mad.
Back to status, it's the same feedback loop. Economy? Basically same feedback loop. I think of all of these systems as games. I imagine if they were recreational games, would they be good games? The answer is always no. If these games were games for recreation, where there was meaning in them, meaningful reward and challenge and so on, would we opt to play them or would we say, "This is a pretty shitty game, actually"?
You'll find that many games humans play are rigged this way, skyhook themselves, and then become self-serving feedback loops. No one would enjoy playing these games after enough time because there's no check system to keep things fresh and reset the game state. The leaderboards dominate things, become the game admins, and then rig the game, making it bad for most people.
The last line of this should really provoke one to think of how utterly arbitrary all of this is. I don't think it means there's no fact of the matter anywhere, there's good reason to think virtue is real, better economic systems and worse ones exist, better approaches to medicine and worse ones exist, etc., since these relate fairly objectively to beings like ourselves who simply do thrive/fail to thrive in such systems. Bad psychiatric model 9453: Most of us are unhappy to some degree so we all begin morphine drips so things feel better. Bad economic model 7284: Burn all the money right now. These are objectively bad, not chocolate/vanilla preferences.
The solution is some sort of thought out "reset"-- without that, the world we create becomes a kind of clunky system running on bad code to begin with, that produces bad output, and then it's garbage in->garbage out. This is one of the most important intellectual problems humanity faces today, because it's a root problem that touches virtually every other problem. Reset all human games or continue going off course.
There are plenty of good, well-meaning psychiatrists. One can read about drugs like xanomeline and trospium chloride where perhaps practitioners and patients feel as though their incentives are aligned. Patients are free to read and pursue psychiatry as desired, seeking out SAINT Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy [though many modern clinicians would probably want evidence of depression being of the so-called "treatment resistant" variety]. Many times, a psychiatrist can function sort of like a strong general practitioner and dole out somewhat standard scientifically informed evidence-backed advice on a variety of useful topics. I am confident plenty of prospective patients get utility from psychiatry even when they go in knowing and stating that medication is off the table e.g. "S" from Laura Baur MD's testimonials section. Psychiatrists deal with anti-psychiatry all the time and can still make money talking with clients about modern cotton+cotton pillow markets e.g. informed by biological archives as well as coworkers in sleep neurology etc.
> The solution is some sort of thought out "reset"-- without that, the world we create becomes a kind of clunky system running on bad code to begin with, that produces bad output, and then it's garbage in->garbage out.
The real problem here is that IF talent exists, it is important to incentivize the socially-useful deployment of those talents. Briefly, people who drive more value should get paid more.
If you do some systemic reset on economics or job comp or tax policy or whatever, you're likely to disencentivize the most talented because of this.
But economic growth is the biggest lever we HAVE to bring people out of poverty and raise standards of living for everyone, including the non-talented, including the poor. ~1B people have been lifted out of <$5 a day poverty in the last 50 years, due to economic growth.
For all the people that think billionaries are ruining all systems and exploiting everyone else - ~70% of the Forbe's list are self-made.
At least half of the other 30% are only one generation away. Billionaires for the most part, are extremely productive members of society that created a ton of jobs and a ton of economic growth.
The worry about talent is misguided because talent isn't what ultimately decides if you create a world worth living in. The conditions of the untalented decide. The quality of life of the people who just drew the hands of a) unrecognized talent(plenty of potential Einsteins in gutters, I feel), or b) simply lacking talent through bad luck. The kind of world we make for those people say far more about our world than the kind of world we make for the talented. The talented are already at a surplus, they don't need more. The reality here is that the world right now is structured as a massive human(and animal) sacrifice ritual, and socioeconomic structure is one of the main boogeymen here, where money is too big and too powerful to fall, yet it is entirely fictional. It's just a silly game we invented, but countless beings suffer immensely because of this game on a more surface level, and because we are beings wired to behave badly as a survival function, on a more deep level. That's why we invent the brazen bulls, that's why we blow the limbs off of small children in wars, that's why we make unethical drugs that don't work very well, have shit side effects, but create grotesque profits. That's why we lie and obscure such things and argue online. That's why we play countless mentally ill dominance games to various degrees of subtlety and sophistication. We're the baddies, and we're wired to be tone-deaf to our own terrible nature, because that's what the DNA rewards. When the bugs are features, you have a very serious, paradoxical problem.
Those are some interesting thoughts mate, but to get a clear understanding let me ask you this - are you trying to impose that the talented are only completely and significantly talented when they are able to socially deploy those skills and talent? and the self made rich have done the same and doing so only creates/generates some realistic value for the "talented", and this exactly brings them to achieve the 'high status', so should we say that status and value are in a direct proportion to each other, given the fact that the individual would only succeed by socially using those talents. willingly or not
One caveat: Relying only on easily measurable metrics to evaluate performance also comes with its own problems. I’ll give two examples.
First, standardized testing in schools. Teachers tend to focus on improving test scores at the expense of more practical skills. Instead of teaching students how to write emails, for example, all of the focus goes to writing the five paragraph essay.
Second, citations in academia. Since number of citations is used to evaluate research performance, some researchers may focus on publishing large quantities of citable papers (paper mills) rather than publishing a smaller of number of solid papers.
As soon as a performance metric becomes widely used, people will try to optimize for it and game the system.
I'm not sure if it would be better to rely on performance metrics or status. Perhaps a mix of the two. Is there something else we can use?
"We are in great denial about all this" (about the importance of status). This was one of the points of The Elephant in the Brain. But cultures vary in how open they are about acknowledging the importance of status. North Americans practice faux egalitarianism (I have examples if readers aren't convinced already). Americans have social norms that are the pretense of "everyone is equal", but underneath that, people mostly understand, at least implicitly, the importance of status. East Asians (and Asians more generally, from India to Japan) are more open about explicitly acknowledging hierarchy.
This also affects romantic relationships. Men & women that are otherwise quite good are overlooked because they're not high status. There's a huge status opportunity cost that most humans are bearing needlessly.
I would argue that there are two different status categories to be high or low in. There is your status "in the eye of the beholder", as determined by the individual whose point of view you are looking from. For example, I am very good at Rimworld (Game), this give me status from the point of view of two of my friends.
The second category is the agreed amalgamation of everyone's personal pecking orders. This is what your society in general considers high / low status (I think this is what Mr Hanson is talking about). Rimworld skill actively lowers my status in the view of society in general.
In your example I would say that your society has classed these individuals as low status (bad, do not be friends / romantically engaged with) and you have classed them higher (good, be friends with these people).
Your preferences may differ from the average preferences in your society.
Not sure about this "regulators are high status" angle. Federal bureaucrats are not particularly high status, certainly not relative to the wealthy individuals and business interests they're tasked with regulating.
"the first such heuristic was probably: copy the high status. "
Why is status an exogenous variable? Sociologists speak of prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. A prestige hierarchy confers status on people who are competent, which would be good people to copy from. It confers high status on the fisherman who is good at catching fish.
I assumed that the underlying claim here was something like that made about g: even though you could imagine various forms of influence, trust, value of opinions in various contexts , romantic desierability, income potential to be independent it turns out there is a single variable that's highly predictive of all of them.
>They are the highest power of our world, deciding for us what is right and good and just, and changing those things when they like.
Nah. The overall point is correct, of course, but even for our beloved overlords those things aren't arbitrary. They too dance to the tune of their (largely unconscious) biology, and whatever emergent superstructures developed on top of that.
Economists or sociologists or someone should quantify status to make it easier to analyze. Are there conservation laws? Can it be exchanged? In what contexts does it fail to be useful? Is there an upper bound?
Within the population, are there different sub-groups, with some making status much more of a God than others, and possibly some groups who are anti-status?
In this modern atomized society our Elites have become almost a separate species from us. And they are a predatory parasitic species that use propaganda to parasitize us.
Yes, the referenced film They Live is a classic. I used to think Colson Baker was a pre eminent radical visionary genius. Now I do not. I would love to have 100 citations in pure mathematics.
"Parts of economics can be improved by recognizing that people don’t optimize for money, but for status. Money is just a status memory. Where there is a conflict between earning money and more status, status optimization wins and helps explain these puzzles and alleged “irrationalities” described by behavioral economics." https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4832622
This is probably the best post I've seen on this blog, and that's because this is a fundamental problem that doesn't only touch status. By the way, this is the sort of argument one should be making when debating the efficacy of medicine(I'm thinking back to that Scott/Robin exchange a few months back on this). Especially psychiatry, if the authorities decide what mental health is, then there's a self-serving feedback loop that happens where the mental profiles of the authorities rig the conception of mental health. That's what is not factored into something like psychiatry and the system is not checked/balanced around this problem. Psychiatry simply has a birth point, the culture/mental profiles of those people influence the field, the field influences reality, and then this continues to feed into itself and not really create a meaningful/deep enough concept of mental health, rather one that's obviously in infancy.
Bad incentives further rig things with respect to things like bad drugs/bad treatments(it has only been decades since lobotomies)-- the assumption is never, "The model is wrong", the assumption is, "The patient, who is broken, isn't responding to the treatment" until there's some measurable response. "Results" here (which I argue aren't very meaningful) are almost always superficial and never capture deeper problems. Things are "disorders" for the most proximate(and therefore brittle, superficial, low-meaning) reasons, and not because say, the world is kind of hellish and the species itself is mad.
Back to status, it's the same feedback loop. Economy? Basically same feedback loop. I think of all of these systems as games. I imagine if they were recreational games, would they be good games? The answer is always no. If these games were games for recreation, where there was meaning in them, meaningful reward and challenge and so on, would we opt to play them or would we say, "This is a pretty shitty game, actually"?
You'll find that many games humans play are rigged this way, skyhook themselves, and then become self-serving feedback loops. No one would enjoy playing these games after enough time because there's no check system to keep things fresh and reset the game state. The leaderboards dominate things, become the game admins, and then rig the game, making it bad for most people.
The last line of this should really provoke one to think of how utterly arbitrary all of this is. I don't think it means there's no fact of the matter anywhere, there's good reason to think virtue is real, better economic systems and worse ones exist, better approaches to medicine and worse ones exist, etc., since these relate fairly objectively to beings like ourselves who simply do thrive/fail to thrive in such systems. Bad psychiatric model 9453: Most of us are unhappy to some degree so we all begin morphine drips so things feel better. Bad economic model 7284: Burn all the money right now. These are objectively bad, not chocolate/vanilla preferences.
The solution is some sort of thought out "reset"-- without that, the world we create becomes a kind of clunky system running on bad code to begin with, that produces bad output, and then it's garbage in->garbage out. This is one of the most important intellectual problems humanity faces today, because it's a root problem that touches virtually every other problem. Reset all human games or continue going off course.
There are plenty of good, well-meaning psychiatrists. One can read about drugs like xanomeline and trospium chloride where perhaps practitioners and patients feel as though their incentives are aligned. Patients are free to read and pursue psychiatry as desired, seeking out SAINT Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy [though many modern clinicians would probably want evidence of depression being of the so-called "treatment resistant" variety]. Many times, a psychiatrist can function sort of like a strong general practitioner and dole out somewhat standard scientifically informed evidence-backed advice on a variety of useful topics. I am confident plenty of prospective patients get utility from psychiatry even when they go in knowing and stating that medication is off the table e.g. "S" from Laura Baur MD's testimonials section. Psychiatrists deal with anti-psychiatry all the time and can still make money talking with clients about modern cotton+cotton pillow markets e.g. informed by biological archives as well as coworkers in sleep neurology etc.
> The solution is some sort of thought out "reset"-- without that, the world we create becomes a kind of clunky system running on bad code to begin with, that produces bad output, and then it's garbage in->garbage out.
The real problem here is that IF talent exists, it is important to incentivize the socially-useful deployment of those talents. Briefly, people who drive more value should get paid more.
If you do some systemic reset on economics or job comp or tax policy or whatever, you're likely to disencentivize the most talented because of this.
But economic growth is the biggest lever we HAVE to bring people out of poverty and raise standards of living for everyone, including the non-talented, including the poor. ~1B people have been lifted out of <$5 a day poverty in the last 50 years, due to economic growth.
For all the people that think billionaries are ruining all systems and exploiting everyone else - ~70% of the Forbe's list are self-made.
At least half of the other 30% are only one generation away. Billionaires for the most part, are extremely productive members of society that created a ton of jobs and a ton of economic growth.
The worry about talent is misguided because talent isn't what ultimately decides if you create a world worth living in. The conditions of the untalented decide. The quality of life of the people who just drew the hands of a) unrecognized talent(plenty of potential Einsteins in gutters, I feel), or b) simply lacking talent through bad luck. The kind of world we make for those people say far more about our world than the kind of world we make for the talented. The talented are already at a surplus, they don't need more. The reality here is that the world right now is structured as a massive human(and animal) sacrifice ritual, and socioeconomic structure is one of the main boogeymen here, where money is too big and too powerful to fall, yet it is entirely fictional. It's just a silly game we invented, but countless beings suffer immensely because of this game on a more surface level, and because we are beings wired to behave badly as a survival function, on a more deep level. That's why we invent the brazen bulls, that's why we blow the limbs off of small children in wars, that's why we make unethical drugs that don't work very well, have shit side effects, but create grotesque profits. That's why we lie and obscure such things and argue online. That's why we play countless mentally ill dominance games to various degrees of subtlety and sophistication. We're the baddies, and we're wired to be tone-deaf to our own terrible nature, because that's what the DNA rewards. When the bugs are features, you have a very serious, paradoxical problem.
Those are some interesting thoughts mate, but to get a clear understanding let me ask you this - are you trying to impose that the talented are only completely and significantly talented when they are able to socially deploy those skills and talent? and the self made rich have done the same and doing so only creates/generates some realistic value for the "talented", and this exactly brings them to achieve the 'high status', so should we say that status and value are in a direct proportion to each other, given the fact that the individual would only succeed by socially using those talents. willingly or not
Very nice article, and some good points.
One caveat: Relying only on easily measurable metrics to evaluate performance also comes with its own problems. I’ll give two examples.
First, standardized testing in schools. Teachers tend to focus on improving test scores at the expense of more practical skills. Instead of teaching students how to write emails, for example, all of the focus goes to writing the five paragraph essay.
Second, citations in academia. Since number of citations is used to evaluate research performance, some researchers may focus on publishing large quantities of citable papers (paper mills) rather than publishing a smaller of number of solid papers.
As soon as a performance metric becomes widely used, people will try to optimize for it and game the system.
I'm not sure if it would be better to rely on performance metrics or status. Perhaps a mix of the two. Is there something else we can use?
"We are in great denial about all this" (about the importance of status). This was one of the points of The Elephant in the Brain. But cultures vary in how open they are about acknowledging the importance of status. North Americans practice faux egalitarianism (I have examples if readers aren't convinced already). Americans have social norms that are the pretense of "everyone is equal", but underneath that, people mostly understand, at least implicitly, the importance of status. East Asians (and Asians more generally, from India to Japan) are more open about explicitly acknowledging hierarchy.
Social animals seek status as a vine seeks the sun
This leaves a gap-- how do people decide who is high status? Based on what criteria?
Based on the criteria that the prior generation of high status folks told us to value.
Wouldn't that imply that the criteria are static? Also— telling is not explicit. Is it done by the elites themselves aspiring?
No, we celebrate cultural activists who use their status to lobby for changes to our norms and status markers.
Status is the reason all bright minds are attracted to consulting and investment banks. It is not just money.
This also affects romantic relationships. Men & women that are otherwise quite good are overlooked because they're not high status. There's a huge status opportunity cost that most humans are bearing needlessly.
I would argue that there are two different status categories to be high or low in. There is your status "in the eye of the beholder", as determined by the individual whose point of view you are looking from. For example, I am very good at Rimworld (Game), this give me status from the point of view of two of my friends.
The second category is the agreed amalgamation of everyone's personal pecking orders. This is what your society in general considers high / low status (I think this is what Mr Hanson is talking about). Rimworld skill actively lowers my status in the view of society in general.
In your example I would say that your society has classed these individuals as low status (bad, do not be friends / romantically engaged with) and you have classed them higher (good, be friends with these people).
Your preferences may differ from the average preferences in your society.
"Status is the extent to which someone thinks getting on your good side will confer benefits upon them."
Not sure about this "regulators are high status" angle. Federal bureaucrats are not particularly high status, certainly not relative to the wealthy individuals and business interests they're tasked with regulating.
"the first such heuristic was probably: copy the high status. "
Why is status an exogenous variable? Sociologists speak of prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. A prestige hierarchy confers status on people who are competent, which would be good people to copy from. It confers high status on the fisherman who is good at catching fish.
Prestige is an aggregate of all sorts of impressiveness, with the relative weights on those set by the local culture.
I assumed that the underlying claim here was something like that made about g: even though you could imagine various forms of influence, trust, value of opinions in various contexts , romantic desierability, income potential to be independent it turns out there is a single variable that's highly predictive of all of them.
Yes, Robin knows this distinction so it's curious that it's missing here.
>They are the highest power of our world, deciding for us what is right and good and just, and changing those things when they like.
Nah. The overall point is correct, of course, but even for our beloved overlords those things aren't arbitrary. They too dance to the tune of their (largely unconscious) biology, and whatever emergent superstructures developed on top of that.
OK, I changed "like" to "collectively choose".
Economists or sociologists or someone should quantify status to make it easier to analyze. Are there conservation laws? Can it be exchanged? In what contexts does it fail to be useful? Is there an upper bound?
Within the population, are there different sub-groups, with some making status much more of a God than others, and possibly some groups who are anti-status?
Subgroups often try to change their local weights re what counts for local status. None ignore status.
In this modern atomized society our Elites have become almost a separate species from us. And they are a predatory parasitic species that use propaganda to parasitize us.
Yes, the referenced film They Live is a classic. I used to think Colson Baker was a pre eminent radical visionary genius. Now I do not. I would love to have 100 citations in pure mathematics.
"Parts of economics can be improved by recognizing that people don’t optimize for money, but for status. Money is just a status memory. Where there is a conflict between earning money and more status, status optimization wins and helps explain these puzzles and alleged “irrationalities” described by behavioral economics." https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4832622