Status Is Your God
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. In general, system features that evolved earlier, or which more other features depend on, are harder to change, and get more “entrenched”. Early basic features of our DNA systems, and our software systems, have become similarly entrenched.
Cultural evolution doesn’t work if people just copy the behavior of random associates. It could only get started via some effective heuristic re who to copy from. And the first such heuristic was probably: copy the high status. While over time we have developed many better heuristics (e.g., fish like the guy who catches the most fish), we still use that first heuristic a lot, and many other cultural systems have been built on top of it. Which is why it is now hard to change our status habits, even when we have better options.
For example, we rely on status to select, incentivize, and monitor important professionals like teachers, doctors, and lawyers. Instead of allocating them based on measures of on-the-job performance, or giving them incentives to perform well, we more just trust that their status makes them behave well. Famous “halo effects” make us trust them far outside their areas of expertise. Instead of wanting them to be trained by practicing the job they will do, we don’t mind them just competing to impress other high status folks in whatever ways those folks choose. And our legal systems give high status folk many advantages directly, and also indirectly via better access to lawyers and loopholes.
Instead of getting predictions from prediction markets where anyone can trade, we ban those so we can instead get our predictions from high status officials. Sure, we are aware that high status people might cheat us, which is why we let other high status folks tell us if that has happened; no need to check ourselves. We also assign high status groups to police themselves, because they would know best about such things.
We not only trust high status people to behave well themselves, we also trust them to regulate and control the lives of others. In orgs, the highest status person tells everyone else what to do. And as we see government as higher status than others, we want it to regulate others, instead of vice versa. We don’t regulate regulators much, as they are high status. People with low status, like the poor, are regulated especially strongly, while high status folks like the rich and well educated tend to be exempt from regulations. Having the right contacts, and knowing the right tricks, lets you get around them.
We tell ourselves we don’t care much about being high status ourselves, nor that our associates are high status. But we in fact put huge weights on status when choosing associates. And almost nothing actually gives us more pleasure than to personally acquire what we see as virtues, i.e., the markers of high status, and to think others see us as having done so. That is heaven, where the flowers smell, the sun shines and the angels sing.
We trust the high status not only to tell us who is high status, but also tell us what are the markers of high status, and when those change, even if they change fast. We also trust them to tell us when key social values and norms have changed. They are the highest power of our world, deciding for us what is right and good and just, and changing those things when they so collectively choose.
Yes, high status groups often fight with each other. But then we trust those who seem to win such fights, and thus gain fight-winning status markers, to tell us that the others should no longer be seen as high status
We are in great denial about all this, however. Many say that status is just a mild heuristic we use to decide who gets what roles when we don’t have more specific info to rely on. Which ignores our huge common failures to generate and collect that more specific info.
Status truly is your god, whether you would admit so or not.
Added 1Oct: To be clear, I’m fine with our rating some people as better on particular dimensions, and even overall. But I want to be able to trust those ratings more.
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.
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?