Having a romantic partner is useful in many ways. You won’t be as lonely, you can ask them for advice, you can do activities together, and you can share transport and even a household with them. But if you look carefully, you will notice that many people don’t choose such partners mainly for their promise in such roles. They instead seek high status partners, who make them look good by association. Partners who are hot, funny, rich, powerful, etc.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Counterpoint - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey... actually pretty much all of the tech CEOs are dorks at least to the general public.
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).
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.
100% just want my leaders to be hot also
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.
"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.
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.
Counterpoint - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey... actually pretty much all of the tech CEOs are dorks at least to the general public.
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).