This is brilliant as always and thought provoking. I had never before considered that not having accountability is itself a status symbol but now I cannot unsee it.
As for the point about bosses projecting prestige as a way of laundering dominance, I'm honestly not sure that either you or Simler has understood Henrich. The argument isn't that we admire people from whom we are attempting to directly learn useful things, but rather that we evolved in an environment where we couldn't tell what we needed to learn from successful people and therefore had to emulate them overall as closely as possible. How would I know if our tribe's most successful hunter is successful because of his face paint or in spite of it? All I know is that he is doing well and I will try to do everything just the way he does, which involves watching him very closely. This strategy is entirely unconscious and and is now baked into our brains in a way that results in us wanting to emulate Michael Jordan's choice of undergarments enough for him to drive Hanes sales.
Mutatis mutandis, our boss is obviously doing something right, or he wouldn't be our boss, and if we pay attention to him, It is because of an unconscious desire to become successful as well. Of course, if we know that he only has his position because of nepotism or corruption or perverse incentive structures that reward psychopathy, perhaps we will be disgusted by him rather than admire him. And then, of course, only dominance remains.
Why would evolution care if someone is the boss only because of incentive structures that reward psychopathy. I mean, if there was ever such a structure it was probably the one which put Genghis Khan at the top of the hierarchy across the entire world largely because he was rewarded for his psychopathic willingness to massacre and torture.
Yet he was probably the most genetically successful individual in the past 100k years (maybe excepting one of the person who had the adult lactose tolerance gene).
You're not thinking far enough back. We're talking about changes that improve capacities for observational learning at a time in prehistory when knowing to carry gourds full of water was still in the process of making us lose all of our fur and get better at sweating. Imagine leading an expedition to make first contact with a previously uncontacted tribe. Your team is 50% made up of professional hockey players and 50% made up of members of Congress. While it is possible to spin up all kinds of clever mental stories about how maybe the tribe would figure out who was actually in charge and who isn't, I hope that you can see such narratives would just be copes.
That seems like an argument about group selection: eg we are selected for not trying to get to the top of 'bad' status hierarchies because doing so would harm the group. But I'm skeptical that ends up working out.
There is probably selection not to do things that substantially increase personal risk but I'm not sure there is pressure to care about how good the status hierarchy is for the tribe as a whole.
I'm not honestly sure how that could be an argument about group selection. It's just straightforwardly an argument that if one member of your four foot tall furry tribe stays out longer foraging because he carries gourds of water into arid regions, even if you have a functional IQ of about 45 you can still learn to use a water gourd by sheer mimetic imitation and improve your access to calories and reproduction. Monkey see, monkey do - except that we are vastly better at this kind of seeing and doing than monkeys are. One of Henrich's essential points is that subtle cues for health and prosperity drive imitation in complex tasks such as food preparation. If one old woman in the village is healthier than others, you imitate her food preparation methods because you are a member of a species that is good at imitation and is still about 8,000 years away from inventing analytic tools good enough to spot the trace poisons her methods are removing. Your ability to spot health and success automatically flags people like Jeb Bush as problematic.
This is one issue where I agree with you 100%. Status considerations substitute for objective thinking.
"Who is right or wrong depends entirely on who has higher status. No need to consider any tricky arguments, just look at reputation and that settles it." Ugh.
"I said it and I'm high status therefore you can't question me." Ugh.
"If you disagree with this person you must be attacking his status and the appropriate response is to attack your status in return. No need to refute anything you said." Ugh.
"I refuse to admit any doubt or error, even when I know I made a mistake, because that would lower my status." Ugh.
Irrational status instincts forestall objective thought or argument and help to divide us into tribes. Members of one tribe judge members of the other tribe to be low-status, because they disagree, and therefore there's no need to reason with someone of perceived low status, they can only be attacked and suppressed.
Maybe in primitive hunter-gatherer societies these instincts were more appropriate. They're everything that is wrong with right-wing authoritarian politics in the US, as well as left-wing authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and North Korea. Cults of personality.
"Whuffie has all the problems of money, and then a bunch more that are unique to it. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, we see how Whuffie – despite its claims to being ‘‘meritocratic’’ – ends up pooling up around sociopathic jerks who know how to flatter, cajole, or terrorize their way to the top. Once you have a lot of Whuffie – once a lot of people hold you to be reputable – other people bend over backwards to give you opportunities to do things that make you even more reputable, putting you in a position where you can speechify, lead, drive the golden spike, and generally take credit for everything that goes well, while blaming all the screw-ups on lesser mortals."
Despite your high status as leader in this space, I disagree with you. You are correct when you say that status markers are a shared construct that demonstrates commitment to alliance networks, especially when those markers are costly to obtain and hard to fake such as tattoos, scars, deep textual knowledge, etc.
However, it is obvious that status and behaviours related to reputation management have only arisen as it relates to gene survival, not for the sake of status itself as you seem to suggest. To bask in the reflected glory of your ally does not help your survival at the margin (famine, war, disaster, etc). As a social species we survive with the group and die when ostracised. Additionally, we die when following bad leaders so there is selection pressure for good "practical" leaders rather than status markers exclusively.
Status dynamics operates similarly at all scales from interpersonal to international, like a fractal. As has all been said a thousand times before, all of the vast literature on the human condition is essentially dancing around these status dynamics in how we angle for the best status outcome given the hand we are dealt in a way that maximises gene survival. That can lead to many different behaviours: sharing resources with the group, undermining the leader (rivals), boldly taking risks, helping lower status (coalitions), defecting to another group, punishing defectors, etc, etc.
I don't get why basking in the reflected glory of your leader/partner helps your own survival, even when gender removes the rival dynamic. For example, if your partner gains too much status they may replace your alliance with someone else who has more status.
It would be very interesting if an AI could be trained through repeated and competitive simulation of individually vulnerable but high expressive agents in a resource constrained environment (i.e. like ancient humans) to display similar status seeking behaviours as you suggest. This would be the scientific way to settle such questions.
>It would be very interesting if an AI could be trained through repeated and competitive simulation of individually vulnerable but high expressive agents in a resource constrained environment (i.e. like ancient humans) to display similar status seeking behaviours as you suggest. This would be the scientific way to settle such question
Nowak, Martin A., and Karl Sigmund. "Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring." Nature 393.6685 (1998): 573-577.
"When status is the main function of leaders, people would be less interested in the various mechanisms that we economists focus on by which a community could leaders accountable."
There's a verb missing there. "to hold accountable"?
There are different leadership styles: charismatic (personality-based), transformational (inspiration-based), transactional (transaction-based)), bureaucratic (rules-based). You're talking about charismatic leadership, and it's a natural double-edged sword: Mandela was charismatic...so was Hitler.
What people seek in their leaders is very context-dependent. Arguably, volatile times favour the charisma because the charisma can exploit uncertainty by offering certainty through conviction: "I'm right, everything else is fake news."
I think the status argument is very status-oriented. If you're into status then you'll play status games and those who are also into status will play along. Those who are not into status will not play along, and, if they have sufficient weight, nullify the status game. Status only works if enough people believe it. If you don't, you're largely immune to it. If the majority don't, it's exposed for the game that it is.
Those not into status will not be able to play off of each other and so won't be playing any kind of multiplayer game at all. So they as a group could not nullify anything, even if they consisted 99% of the people. Without status, there is no group in a meaningful sense.
Overturning/changing the existing status hierarchy or the rules of the status game is possible, but you cannot escape status games in general. It's a a biological and psychological foundation for human interaction. It's not just some abstract or optional thing that an abstraction-loving Robin Hanson writes about abstractly. This is a good introduction on the topic, if you're interested:
I agree that there's no avoiding status in groups. However, it's quite feasible to avoid or at least downplay the status GAMES, particularly as a leader. A leader preoccupied with status will evoke followers preoccupied with status, and the reverse is true. When I said "believe in it" I guess I meant "believe that playing status games is useful", where, in most productive, sustainable team cultures, it is not. Status should be a byproduct of useful action, not an intent.
In business there's an indirect mechanism where leaders lose status if their company loses money. In reality many companies are selection effect survivors, where their business somewhat runs itself not through planning (though obviously that is part of it), but through selection of ideas/cultures that make money even if the reason why is mostly tacit knowledge.
So while employee goals are to curry favor with high status leaders, people know at some level that the entire enterprise has an outside auditor which occasionally comes to the fore which lower status on leaders who can't succeed in making money.
If a CEO heads a failing business they'll just get a golden parachute and move on to head another business based on their prestigious experience and connections, regardless of performance. They're already "in the club" and that matters more than results.
Weird how evolution led people to prefer romantic partners with good genes, evidence of good genes, etc., rather than specific types of utility that may not have been particularly useful back in the day. As an intro to the boss point, really doesn't make much sense (because relationship with boss is generally about hierarchy/power, not sex).
While leader status certainly plays a role, whether or not it really matters depends on how it's districuted amoung the canidates. For instance, if there are a bunch of potential leaders who seem to signal a similar degree of status the effect is less relevant.
Indeed, I think it puts Trump's strategy into an interesting light. By insulting other candidates he creates a situation where it's harder for everyone to be seen as similarly high status (not responding, unless done properly, suggests lower status).
Trump's strategy involved pointing out how inherently low status most of our oligarchs really are. Without very powerful partisan lenses on it is impossible to imagine someone like Jeb Bush or Adam Schiff as genuinely high status people. Trump was crass and low status in a way that made him relatable to his voter base, but also signaled high status (to them) by being a billionaire businessman.
I guess I don't even really understand that. At least pre-Trump those individuals wielded huge amounts of power, influence and we're often personally wealthy. Other people saw them as high status and tried to suck up to them and influence them.
If that's not 'really' being high status what is? I mean I don't get it but they even could attract very desierable romantic partners. What else does being high status consist of?
>Other people saw them as high status and tried to suck up to them and influence them.
Maybe, but this reminds me of Richard Hanania's post about why anti-abortion laws offend so many women. He argues that it is in part because "low status males" make these laws. They may be powerful politicians, yet Hanania observes that many women view them as low status. One, perhaps crude, proxy for male status is: how many women would want to have sex with them? If so, it would explain a psychological connection between why pro-abortion rights women object to abortion laws with the language that these male politicians really want "control over their bodies". They are horrified, perhaps, by the idea it is low status men who want that control instead of high status men -- a situation they perhaps wouldn't mind as much.
Regarding the abortion thing, I sorta agree but I feel that's not that relevant to the point here. Yah, sure the kind of people who complain about male politicians telling them what to do with their bodies absolutely wouldn't want to sleep with those politicians (either bc they just a state rep w/o much power of bc even relatively powerful republicans are viewed with a certain disgust in left leaning circles).
But here we are talking about republicans. Indeed, I bet that before Trump tore them a new one as many republican women would have said they wanted to sleep with Rubio, Christie or some of the other dudes as Trump.
Maybe not quite as much because he's a tv celebrity but my point is that it wasn't like these guys weren't really high status before.
What happened is that Trump's behavior put them into a bind. At a gut level we feel that no one who is really powerful would put up with shit like that (at least if it bothered them) but responding risked making them look childish and draw them into the kind of conflict Trump is great at and thet aren't.
That's an excellent question and it is likely that I was conflating prestige and status more broadly due to Hanson mentioning both in this post. I wrote another comment discussing prestige from a different perspective - Joseph Henrich's. You might want to scroll up a sec and read that before continuing reading this one.
In imagination, place yourself in a tribe 10,000 years ago. You very much look up to and admire the best hunter who is also the best warrior. Perhaps he is older now, and perhaps you are too young to have known him in his prime, but the lines of his limbs and the way he carries himself makes plain that the stories about his prowess are all true. All of the hunters (who, remember, are also warriors) between the two of you in age emulate him as much as they can. Perhaps you also fear him and his supporters, but more than anything you want to be like him in every way.
Now step back to our time for a moment and look at Jeb Bush. It is obvious that despite his so called status there is nothing in him whatsoever that we can emulate that will make us better off. He was born rich into a world that rewards even the most revolting people for accidents of birth. Now look at Adam Schiff. He got to where he is by working cunningly and hard, but working cunningly and hard at being something that is utterly unworthy of emulation. The consideration of these men does not inspire admiration so much as a sense of outrage that we live in a system that promotes such creatures.
Henrich's positive example is Michael Jordan, whom people regard as having very positive characteristics. Not merely one of the greatest athletes of all time but an apparently good person. This translates through our primate brains into all kinds of interesting emotional responses. Sales numbers certainly show that we want to wear the same kind of underwear as Michael Jordan. But many of us, if stopped on the street and informed that we were wearing the same kind of underwear as Adam Schiff, would strip naked then and there to correct this unfortunate state of affairs.
I'm kinda confused since your remark here seems directly in tension with the one above. Jeb had power, prestige, expectation he's gain even more power and prestige so shouldn't your conclusion be that: well he's the boss so there must be something I can learn by emulating him?
I mean sure, he was born into a political family and that gave him a nice boost. But look at all the other people in that same situation who haven't done anywhere near as well. Also, it's very hard to disentangle what part is merely the result of having some good starting point (which isn't something we could learn) and what is the result of having useful skills/behaviors passed on.
And that was only one of his opponents. There was also Cruz, Huckabee, Paul, Rubio, Cristie etc who weren't born into political dynasties.
This thread is really interesting and seeing the merit in both sides. You said “But look at all the other people in that same situation who haven't done anywhere near as well.” What do we mean when we say such a statement (we all do it). Is it the
Oops .. clipped send accidentally. Is it the case that person x has done better than person y because they have amassed great wealth and prestige, if on investigation person y is better adjusted to his world, content and well regarded and respected, whereas person x is a malcontent, neurotic, and generally not well perceived?
If we're talking about an evolved ability and tendency to identify and emulate successful people, there are very many cues that we might not be consciously thinking about. To return to the example of Trump's insults, one of his gifts is putting things into plain language that perhaps nobody else was saying. In even a still photograph of Jeb Bush, you can tell that he actually is low energy. And even a five second video clip provides more than enough information for your brain to make some rather unflattering assumptions about him. A person consciously telling himself that Jeb Bush is high status is going to have some unconscious processes saying, 'Hold up, are you trying to pull a fast one on me again? Something is fishy.'
This is brilliant as always and thought provoking. I had never before considered that not having accountability is itself a status symbol but now I cannot unsee it.
As for the point about bosses projecting prestige as a way of laundering dominance, I'm honestly not sure that either you or Simler has understood Henrich. The argument isn't that we admire people from whom we are attempting to directly learn useful things, but rather that we evolved in an environment where we couldn't tell what we needed to learn from successful people and therefore had to emulate them overall as closely as possible. How would I know if our tribe's most successful hunter is successful because of his face paint or in spite of it? All I know is that he is doing well and I will try to do everything just the way he does, which involves watching him very closely. This strategy is entirely unconscious and and is now baked into our brains in a way that results in us wanting to emulate Michael Jordan's choice of undergarments enough for him to drive Hanes sales.
Mutatis mutandis, our boss is obviously doing something right, or he wouldn't be our boss, and if we pay attention to him, It is because of an unconscious desire to become successful as well. Of course, if we know that he only has his position because of nepotism or corruption or perverse incentive structures that reward psychopathy, perhaps we will be disgusted by him rather than admire him. And then, of course, only dominance remains.
I think we understand Henrich.
Why would evolution care if someone is the boss only because of incentive structures that reward psychopathy. I mean, if there was ever such a structure it was probably the one which put Genghis Khan at the top of the hierarchy across the entire world largely because he was rewarded for his psychopathic willingness to massacre and torture.
Yet he was probably the most genetically successful individual in the past 100k years (maybe excepting one of the person who had the adult lactose tolerance gene).
You're not thinking far enough back. We're talking about changes that improve capacities for observational learning at a time in prehistory when knowing to carry gourds full of water was still in the process of making us lose all of our fur and get better at sweating. Imagine leading an expedition to make first contact with a previously uncontacted tribe. Your team is 50% made up of professional hockey players and 50% made up of members of Congress. While it is possible to spin up all kinds of clever mental stories about how maybe the tribe would figure out who was actually in charge and who isn't, I hope that you can see such narratives would just be copes.
That seems like an argument about group selection: eg we are selected for not trying to get to the top of 'bad' status hierarchies because doing so would harm the group. But I'm skeptical that ends up working out.
There is probably selection not to do things that substantially increase personal risk but I'm not sure there is pressure to care about how good the status hierarchy is for the tribe as a whole.
I'm not honestly sure how that could be an argument about group selection. It's just straightforwardly an argument that if one member of your four foot tall furry tribe stays out longer foraging because he carries gourds of water into arid regions, even if you have a functional IQ of about 45 you can still learn to use a water gourd by sheer mimetic imitation and improve your access to calories and reproduction. Monkey see, monkey do - except that we are vastly better at this kind of seeing and doing than monkeys are. One of Henrich's essential points is that subtle cues for health and prosperity drive imitation in complex tasks such as food preparation. If one old woman in the village is healthier than others, you imitate her food preparation methods because you are a member of a species that is good at imitation and is still about 8,000 years away from inventing analytic tools good enough to spot the trace poisons her methods are removing. Your ability to spot health and success automatically flags people like Jeb Bush as problematic.
100% just want my leaders to be hot also
Unironically yes.
Mens sana in corpore sano
This is one issue where I agree with you 100%. Status considerations substitute for objective thinking.
"Who is right or wrong depends entirely on who has higher status. No need to consider any tricky arguments, just look at reputation and that settles it." Ugh.
"I said it and I'm high status therefore you can't question me." Ugh.
"If you disagree with this person you must be attacking his status and the appropriate response is to attack your status in return. No need to refute anything you said." Ugh.
"I refuse to admit any doubt or error, even when I know I made a mistake, because that would lower my status." Ugh.
Irrational status instincts forestall objective thought or argument and help to divide us into tribes. Members of one tribe judge members of the other tribe to be low-status, because they disagree, and therefore there's no need to reason with someone of perceived low status, they can only be attacked and suppressed.
Maybe in primitive hunter-gatherer societies these instincts were more appropriate. They're everything that is wrong with right-wing authoritarian politics in the US, as well as left-wing authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and North Korea. Cults of personality.
This is one of the central themes in Cory Doctorow's novel 'Down and out in the Magic Kingdom'.
From https://locusmag.com/2016/03/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/
"Whuffie has all the problems of money, and then a bunch more that are unique to it. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, we see how Whuffie – despite its claims to being ‘‘meritocratic’’ – ends up pooling up around sociopathic jerks who know how to flatter, cajole, or terrorize their way to the top. Once you have a lot of Whuffie – once a lot of people hold you to be reputable – other people bend over backwards to give you opportunities to do things that make you even more reputable, putting you in a position where you can speechify, lead, drive the golden spike, and generally take credit for everything that goes well, while blaming all the screw-ups on lesser mortals."
Despite your high status as leader in this space, I disagree with you. You are correct when you say that status markers are a shared construct that demonstrates commitment to alliance networks, especially when those markers are costly to obtain and hard to fake such as tattoos, scars, deep textual knowledge, etc.
However, it is obvious that status and behaviours related to reputation management have only arisen as it relates to gene survival, not for the sake of status itself as you seem to suggest. To bask in the reflected glory of your ally does not help your survival at the margin (famine, war, disaster, etc). As a social species we survive with the group and die when ostracised. Additionally, we die when following bad leaders so there is selection pressure for good "practical" leaders rather than status markers exclusively.
Status dynamics operates similarly at all scales from interpersonal to international, like a fractal. As has all been said a thousand times before, all of the vast literature on the human condition is essentially dancing around these status dynamics in how we angle for the best status outcome given the hand we are dealt in a way that maximises gene survival. That can lead to many different behaviours: sharing resources with the group, undermining the leader (rivals), boldly taking risks, helping lower status (coalitions), defecting to another group, punishing defectors, etc, etc.
I don't get why basking in the reflected glory of your leader/partner helps your own survival, even when gender removes the rival dynamic. For example, if your partner gains too much status they may replace your alliance with someone else who has more status.
It would be very interesting if an AI could be trained through repeated and competitive simulation of individually vulnerable but high expressive agents in a resource constrained environment (i.e. like ancient humans) to display similar status seeking behaviours as you suggest. This would be the scientific way to settle such questions.
>It would be very interesting if an AI could be trained through repeated and competitive simulation of individually vulnerable but high expressive agents in a resource constrained environment (i.e. like ancient humans) to display similar status seeking behaviours as you suggest. This would be the scientific way to settle such question
Nowak, Martin A., and Karl Sigmund. "Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring." Nature 393.6685 (1998): 573-577.
https://www.nature.com/articles/31225
"When status is the main function of leaders, people would be less interested in the various mechanisms that we economists focus on by which a community could leaders accountable."
There's a verb missing there. "to hold accountable"?
There are different leadership styles: charismatic (personality-based), transformational (inspiration-based), transactional (transaction-based)), bureaucratic (rules-based). You're talking about charismatic leadership, and it's a natural double-edged sword: Mandela was charismatic...so was Hitler.
What people seek in their leaders is very context-dependent. Arguably, volatile times favour the charisma because the charisma can exploit uncertainty by offering certainty through conviction: "I'm right, everything else is fake news."
I think the status argument is very status-oriented. If you're into status then you'll play status games and those who are also into status will play along. Those who are not into status will not play along, and, if they have sufficient weight, nullify the status game. Status only works if enough people believe it. If you don't, you're largely immune to it. If the majority don't, it's exposed for the game that it is.
Those not into status will not be able to play off of each other and so won't be playing any kind of multiplayer game at all. So they as a group could not nullify anything, even if they consisted 99% of the people. Without status, there is no group in a meaningful sense.
Overturning/changing the existing status hierarchy or the rules of the status game is possible, but you cannot escape status games in general. It's a a biological and psychological foundation for human interaction. It's not just some abstract or optional thing that an abstraction-loving Robin Hanson writes about abstractly. This is a good introduction on the topic, if you're interested:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/men-and-status-an-introduction/
I agree that there's no avoiding status in groups. However, it's quite feasible to avoid or at least downplay the status GAMES, particularly as a leader. A leader preoccupied with status will evoke followers preoccupied with status, and the reverse is true. When I said "believe in it" I guess I meant "believe that playing status games is useful", where, in most productive, sustainable team cultures, it is not. Status should be a byproduct of useful action, not an intent.
In business there's an indirect mechanism where leaders lose status if their company loses money. In reality many companies are selection effect survivors, where their business somewhat runs itself not through planning (though obviously that is part of it), but through selection of ideas/cultures that make money even if the reason why is mostly tacit knowledge.
So while employee goals are to curry favor with high status leaders, people know at some level that the entire enterprise has an outside auditor which occasionally comes to the fore which lower status on leaders who can't succeed in making money.
If a CEO heads a failing business they'll just get a golden parachute and move on to head another business based on their prestigious experience and connections, regardless of performance. They're already "in the club" and that matters more than results.
Weird how evolution led people to prefer romantic partners with good genes, evidence of good genes, etc., rather than specific types of utility that may not have been particularly useful back in the day. As an intro to the boss point, really doesn't make much sense (because relationship with boss is generally about hierarchy/power, not sex).
While leader status certainly plays a role, whether or not it really matters depends on how it's districuted amoung the canidates. For instance, if there are a bunch of potential leaders who seem to signal a similar degree of status the effect is less relevant.
Indeed, I think it puts Trump's strategy into an interesting light. By insulting other candidates he creates a situation where it's harder for everyone to be seen as similarly high status (not responding, unless done properly, suggests lower status).
Trump's strategy involved pointing out how inherently low status most of our oligarchs really are. Without very powerful partisan lenses on it is impossible to imagine someone like Jeb Bush or Adam Schiff as genuinely high status people. Trump was crass and low status in a way that made him relatable to his voter base, but also signaled high status (to them) by being a billionaire businessman.
I guess I don't even really understand that. At least pre-Trump those individuals wielded huge amounts of power, influence and we're often personally wealthy. Other people saw them as high status and tried to suck up to them and influence them.
If that's not 'really' being high status what is? I mean I don't get it but they even could attract very desierable romantic partners. What else does being high status consist of?
>Other people saw them as high status and tried to suck up to them and influence them.
Maybe, but this reminds me of Richard Hanania's post about why anti-abortion laws offend so many women. He argues that it is in part because "low status males" make these laws. They may be powerful politicians, yet Hanania observes that many women view them as low status. One, perhaps crude, proxy for male status is: how many women would want to have sex with them? If so, it would explain a psychological connection between why pro-abortion rights women object to abortion laws with the language that these male politicians really want "control over their bodies". They are horrified, perhaps, by the idea it is low status men who want that control instead of high status men -- a situation they perhaps wouldn't mind as much.
Regarding the abortion thing, I sorta agree but I feel that's not that relevant to the point here. Yah, sure the kind of people who complain about male politicians telling them what to do with their bodies absolutely wouldn't want to sleep with those politicians (either bc they just a state rep w/o much power of bc even relatively powerful republicans are viewed with a certain disgust in left leaning circles).
But here we are talking about republicans. Indeed, I bet that before Trump tore them a new one as many republican women would have said they wanted to sleep with Rubio, Christie or some of the other dudes as Trump.
Maybe not quite as much because he's a tv celebrity but my point is that it wasn't like these guys weren't really high status before.
What happened is that Trump's behavior put them into a bind. At a gut level we feel that no one who is really powerful would put up with shit like that (at least if it bothered them) but responding risked making them look childish and draw them into the kind of conflict Trump is great at and thet aren't.
That's an excellent question and it is likely that I was conflating prestige and status more broadly due to Hanson mentioning both in this post. I wrote another comment discussing prestige from a different perspective - Joseph Henrich's. You might want to scroll up a sec and read that before continuing reading this one.
In imagination, place yourself in a tribe 10,000 years ago. You very much look up to and admire the best hunter who is also the best warrior. Perhaps he is older now, and perhaps you are too young to have known him in his prime, but the lines of his limbs and the way he carries himself makes plain that the stories about his prowess are all true. All of the hunters (who, remember, are also warriors) between the two of you in age emulate him as much as they can. Perhaps you also fear him and his supporters, but more than anything you want to be like him in every way.
Now step back to our time for a moment and look at Jeb Bush. It is obvious that despite his so called status there is nothing in him whatsoever that we can emulate that will make us better off. He was born rich into a world that rewards even the most revolting people for accidents of birth. Now look at Adam Schiff. He got to where he is by working cunningly and hard, but working cunningly and hard at being something that is utterly unworthy of emulation. The consideration of these men does not inspire admiration so much as a sense of outrage that we live in a system that promotes such creatures.
Henrich's positive example is Michael Jordan, whom people regard as having very positive characteristics. Not merely one of the greatest athletes of all time but an apparently good person. This translates through our primate brains into all kinds of interesting emotional responses. Sales numbers certainly show that we want to wear the same kind of underwear as Michael Jordan. But many of us, if stopped on the street and informed that we were wearing the same kind of underwear as Adam Schiff, would strip naked then and there to correct this unfortunate state of affairs.
I'm kinda confused since your remark here seems directly in tension with the one above. Jeb had power, prestige, expectation he's gain even more power and prestige so shouldn't your conclusion be that: well he's the boss so there must be something I can learn by emulating him?
I mean sure, he was born into a political family and that gave him a nice boost. But look at all the other people in that same situation who haven't done anywhere near as well. Also, it's very hard to disentangle what part is merely the result of having some good starting point (which isn't something we could learn) and what is the result of having useful skills/behaviors passed on.
And that was only one of his opponents. There was also Cruz, Huckabee, Paul, Rubio, Cristie etc who weren't born into political dynasties.
This thread is really interesting and seeing the merit in both sides. You said “But look at all the other people in that same situation who haven't done anywhere near as well.” What do we mean when we say such a statement (we all do it). Is it the
Oops .. clipped send accidentally. Is it the case that person x has done better than person y because they have amassed great wealth and prestige, if on investigation person y is better adjusted to his world, content and well regarded and respected, whereas person x is a malcontent, neurotic, and generally not well perceived?
If we're talking about an evolved ability and tendency to identify and emulate successful people, there are very many cues that we might not be consciously thinking about. To return to the example of Trump's insults, one of his gifts is putting things into plain language that perhaps nobody else was saying. In even a still photograph of Jeb Bush, you can tell that he actually is low energy. And even a five second video clip provides more than enough information for your brain to make some rather unflattering assumptions about him. A person consciously telling himself that Jeb Bush is high status is going to have some unconscious processes saying, 'Hold up, are you trying to pull a fast one on me again? Something is fishy.'