Many texts on such things dive deep into psychology and evolutionary biology, but ignore sociological and anthropological studies that draw a clear picture of how this system works. In this text there are just 2 references to them, and though Webber's works were foundational, there've been a lot of works in sociology in the past 100 years.
The two most promiment names, that this text doesn't even mention, are Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu. Goffman systemized a lot of social interactions. Pierre Bourdieu focused on classes and their reproduction.
Instead, a lot of authors and laymen theorize by building a bridge from, say, macroeconomics and geopolitics, directly into human psychology or bio-psychology, deriving big trends and state structures from simple knee-jerk-like psychological reflexes.
Sounds interesting. I feel like I (and most techies as well) am prone to commit the sin of trying to derive all human behavior from economics/psychology, since we like deriving concepts from first principles.
What simple introductionary readings/videos on Goffman and Bourdieu would you recommend?
It's the science envy. Psychology (despite the replication crisis) firmly established itself as a hard science. Taking the classical distinction of psychology as based on the individual, and sociology on the emerging properties of social systems, we cannot simply infer that the properties of the individual align to social situations.
I think we in the social sciences with our departure from positivism are unable to produce clear laws, or direct applications, we're more concerned with understanding, and not explaining.
In the brain, serotonin seems to be deeply related to social status. This is Jordan Peterson's bit about lobsters - it's so ubiquitous that even lobsters share the same mechanism.
A fairly in depth article, through I do find a major issue that recurs is that they use the same definition of aggression and violence for both men and women, and then use that to eliminate or minimize the existence of female aggression.
Like: "We tamed ourselves by weeding out bullies and domineering males throughout our evolutionary history. Humans organized egalitarian societies, and any male that violated this too much was subsequently the victim of a targeted killing."
Women competing with with other women using dominance behavior like bullying is a very common behavior, and I doubt there is a parent with a teenage daughter or teacher who has not observed this. We can also see this in apes, with female to female dominance behavior being one if not the biggest causes of death for female baboons. To continue with animal observations, male baboons have a different form of dominance behavior, and their behavior also result in dead baboons. Female aggression is about depriving the lower ranked females of food, water, sleep and grooming (together with some amount of bites and scratches), while male aggression is primarily about major injuries sustained during fights. If we define the latter as the single definition of aggression and dominance then the other form becomes invisible to us.
Going down further in the article, they define power as access to and control of resources. Not access to and control of people. This in order to say that women don’t have a strong craving for power because "obtaining power entails the risk of being disliked, and, unlike status, power has few social payoffs". It uses an exclusively male definition for power.
Here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237101081_Female_Do...') is a study done on dominance behavior in female vs male hierarchies. It basically fully invalidates most of this article's claims on male vs female behavior in terms of dominance. It does not seem to use a male-centric definition of dominance.
I am not all against this article. It is a fairly in-depth description of the topic and an interesting read. I would however advise to consider some of the terminology and definitions to be a bit limited, and occasionally leading the reader into misconceptions by trying to use a single definition for both men and women.
> Like: "We tamed ourselves by weeding out bullies and domineering males throughout our evolutionary history. Humans organized egalitarian societies, and any male that violated this too much was subsequently the victim of a targeted killing."
This quote is horribly wrong anyway. Human history, even before agriculture and industrialization, is filled with tribal wars. Maybe it would be more right to say that the aggressive bullies have historically had an outlet for their aggression: killing the aggressive bullies of other tribes. If aggressiveness were absolutely useless personality trait in past societies, it would have been weeded out by the evolution a long time ago.
No mention of social proof either. Social proof affects both males and females, but females are considerably more likely to be swayed by it. This is why so many people observe superficially counterintuitive effects like getting more attention from women when already in the company of an attractive one.
This is also why teen girls are so prone to ostracism. A higher status girl risks her own status by hanging out with an ostracized girl.
That’s not to say we don’t see the same patterns among males, they are just less pronounced.
This is delusional anyway. We're by far the most unegalitarian of all animal species besides maybe things like ants. We have individuals that command entire countries worth of resources and armies to go with.
Yes, women are vicious fighters but use different, and arguably more potent, weapons. A fist-fight with a man might leave you wounded and bleeding for a few days. A woman will leave you ostracized from your friends and family, possibly ending your career, for the rest of your life, often leading to your depression and suicide.
Society (especially now) will approves of a woman's destruction of her target, seeing it as a positive example of "female empowerment", independent of any other fact of the case other than gender. In other words, there is social pressure that encourages females to become domineering bullies. At the same time, causal misandry encourages this false idea that women are somehow excluded from a wide variety of the worst of human behavior, the same behaviors that are actively encouraged in women! This is in addition to the fact that women's anger, violence, sexual assault (especially against children), is very real and, I believe, wildly under-reported.
The prestige/dominance distinction is a naturally attractive idea because it lets us split status into "good" and "bad" kinds. I'm not sure, though, that there's much evidence that the two are truly separate. (To build intuition: in academia, or perhaps in the world of software engineering, it might be hard to distinguish between the two. Brilliant scientists often end up running a lab, and they may then have - and sometimes abuse! - a lot of raw power.)
In real life, I’m sure prestige and dominance are mixed. Pure prestige and pure dominance would be hard to find.
But I see it as a useful construct to delineate the differences regardless, because it maps pretty easily onto the traditional question of “is it better to be feared or loved”? Most people have been exposed to Machiavelli in one way or another, and understand the distinction between the carrot and stick.
Uh. All recorded history would suggest otherwise. Humans love bullies, strongmen, charlatans who promise panaceas at the wave of a stick.
What humans actually don’t like are bullies outside of the current established and expected hierarchy - bullies that threaten their bully.
Prestige and dominance are an utter time-sink, and the reward curve is hideously steep - unless you are at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy, you grind to stay afloat - whereas at the top, prestige and dominance magnetically attract to you.
I think a lot of what we take as being the default condition isn’t - we see all these behaviours and we assume it’s something innate to us and other primates - but I think it’s cultural and Malthusian, rather than a hard-baked desire for primacy.
The hard-baked desire is for survival - and prestige play is a minmax route to this for most people living in a society - it’s easier than setting up your own society. With blackjack. And…
Anyway. Ramblings. My perspective emerges from stepping sideways off the highway of life:
I once strove for status, and garnered no small amount. Didn’t do a damned thing for me - the hierarchy may as well be infinite.
I have found that I enjoy having less than zero status, as there’s nothing to lose, no plays to make, no maintenance payments to be made - here, everyone thinks I am a pauper, possibly mentally defective, definitely helplessly living in squalor off the land like our ancestors. The reality is somewhat different, but I’m content for others to think otherwise. I spent far too much of my life being dogged by high expectations.
I’m a sample of one, but I can’t help but try to examine why I feel as I do - and I think the answer is that I derive my security entirely outside of interpersonal relationships - I don’t owe anyone anything, nor they me, and I need nothing from them.
So… is status “real”? I doubt it. I think it’s just a manifestation of fear and insecurity, and a primal need for a parent figure who can protect and guide.
Perhaps the latter - parents - are also an important part of the need for social hierarchy, as they’re also an element I lacked, being largely raised by impersonal, militarised institutions.
I think it creates social instability when power becomes too decoupled from hierarchy:
That’s the whole point of a hierarchy, to mediate disputes other than the raw exercise of power — and conflicts become sudden and unexpected if insufficient status is granted to those able to wield power. This is a corollary to your point about outsider bullies; if someone strong isn’t integrated into the hierarchy, violence isn’t predictable and hence survival less assured.
Outside of that, I can’t say that “The Game” has held any particular appeal to me — and I dislike many of the status seekers I’ve met.
Like you said, the parenting aspect is crucial- that’s been well established in mainstream psychology for a long time now.
The opposite of insecurity is trust (either in oneself or others), and this is difficult to develop later in life. There is research into this nowadays, anywhere from cognitive science psychology to MDMA assisted PTSD treatments to develop self-trust, but conclusive understanding still evades humanity at this point in time.
I do think most people who are very intelligent in terms of IQ, but have other issues… end up in a similar situation as you. Smart enough to overthink and realize where they exist in society, not smart enough to solve the problem when the solution is supposed to be handed to them from their ancestors.
That’s not an insult by the way- Einstein was smart enough to create relativity, but he had algebra and calculus etc handed to him from his ancestors. I doubt Einstein would have invented relativity from scratch.
I wonder if it’s possible to capture the key essence of parenting and re-teach people critical information that’s supposed to be taught in childhood. We all know about language acquisition and the critical period, after which if a child is not taught, they end up like Genie (the feral child, born 1957). But I suspect there are other social skills that are supposed to be taught, but commonly are not taught by parents, or simply unable to be taught if the parents do not exist.
Rob's anecdote about the precarious Yale lecturer who won't take a lower-status job at a Midwestern University is surprisingly widespread but rarely shared publicly, because if the people working high-prestige low-pay jobs revealed their wages or lack of, they would lose in prestige.
Indeed, entire industries that are high-visibility can get away with paying in prestige rather than money at the entry level. Think low- to no-pay internships. In addition to academia, this includes the top journalism outlets (well-known websites, magazines, etc); fashion houses; and political campaigns.
The second order effect of these industries and organizations paying in prestige is to limit the pool of people in such entry level jobs to those who can afford it. Yes, you see some working-class people there, but you see many children of the elite. And that is how a certain class reproduces its dominance across highly visible cultural and political industries.
At the extreme, there is an element of potlatch in accepting no-pay jobs. Sam Altman's amazing interaction with Senator Kennedy during the AI hearings is a good example of that. Sam can afford to take no pay, and that makes him immune to a certain kind of criticism, augmenting his prestige and influence.
> Left to your own devices, with no task demanding your immediate concentration, you tend to spend a good deal of time thinking about other people—your judgments of them; their evaluations of you.
This might be true for the author but is very presumptuous imo.
I spend approximately no time per day judging others or interrogating my social status. I of course think about other people, but there are many ways to think about others. There are many ways to think about yourself.
I guess it's not surprising the author of a piece on status has a highly status alined thought process, but it's not by a longshot the default mode for everyone.
> But if you say you want to be promoted because you want respect, that’s often regarded as an appropriate desire.
I would think the same in each case. If someone doesn't think they have respect because of their job title, or they think they have it for the inverse, I feel bad for them. If I meet you on a monday and you're an x, and tuesday you're an x+1, in my eyes you're the same person. Similarly if I meet people for the first time. I honestly don't think I'm being particularly contrarian on this. I know idiot ceos, intelligent homeless people, and some kind of everyone in between. This whole take strikes me as naive to the nature of people.
Even the author of some other quoted book has weird priors I completely disagree with:
> for many of us this price is simply too high; we’d rather be low on the totem pole than be perceived as arrogant and domineering
If you're arrogant and domineering _you are low on the totem pole_. It's really interesting to see that this author is putting someone "high" on the totem pole because of some singular status markers like job title / situational power regardless of their behaviour. It says a lot.
It's not that I don't think status is real. I just don't believe it can be gained by maxmimising any one or even some multiple of typical status markers.
It's incredibly liberating to realize that you can stop caring what people think about you, it's like killing a long running rogue prices eating up your resources... We all have access to neuroplasticity if we can challenge the fixed mindset
Can't upvote more, so will repeat: read impro. It's short.
I wonder if it's more useful to a certain kind of person for whom this stuff may be less readily legible, but I suspect there's a lot of that kind here.
this text certainly isn't relevant enough to warrant a second discussion within 8 days. it's a good example for imprecise reasoning where you chain arguments/claims/citations to reach a conclusion but with a little bit of ambiguity or vagueness sneaked in so you can lead it in any desired direction.
I think the author tried to pack a little too much into this article, but it's an interesting topic and his observations ring true.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who successfully climbed the social hierarchy from dysfunctional foster childhood to Ivy league deserves every ounce prestige he earned.
This piece smelled fishy, but then I noticed the footnote that states this is adapted from a Peterson Academy course. That explains the cherry picked citations from impressive sounding social scientists which leads to "evo psych says" as if evo psych is (a) a consensus and (b) something anybody should take seriously. Plus, citing The Great Gatsby makes me think you haven't read a novel since high school. It's just pseudoscience and faux intellectualism all the way down.
Nice to see Henderson on here, I've been a subscriber. I've often thought that status is a function of what's yours to share. It's distinct from positional power that was conferred, because the necessary condition for organic status is to be the object of the desire of others. It's also separate from having shiny stuff, because if it's stolen or unstable, it's not yours to share. Famous musicians and actors have the highest status in the world becuse they can share their fame, but relatively very little direct power - and the most powerful people in the world do not represent what others want, but rather just have control of some diminishing resources.
The psychological definition he uses where power is "control of access to resources" is an ok model. Separating it from status and prestige is key, where he gives the example of olympic athletes vs. nightclub bouncers, where each have high or low status and high or low power respectively.
Conferring power on low status people is a recipe for disaster, where those people will find ways to apply the power to an infinite need for status - without regard for the human desire that confers its legitimacy. It's what makes a lot of the current crop of establishment aspirants so uncanny, they have seized the reins of institutions, but are themselves personally undesirable because they have nothing of their own to share - it's all over leveraged and competing to supplicate themselves. Arguably, the tension in the culture is that there are no good men or good women in institutional power today, and so much so that people in power are trying to erase what "good" even means because it is a source of humiliation for them. They will try arbitrarily to destroy people who have the organic status that their own power does not give them. Never underestimate the capacity of undesirable people for cruelty, it's what the cold war was fought over, imo.
Becoming higher status is a straightforward process of self improvement, where through exercise, education, practice and competence, you become more desirable to others, and the resources you have are ones that are yours to share. There is no mystery there.
The interesting question to me is, given power is rarely ever converted into desirable status, how is status converted into power? We used to call it "convening power," where royalty and celebrities could get people in a room together. If an invitation came from them, it would be accepted, and brokering that meeting (and taking some equity) was how to convert status into power. But if there were a way to convert it directly, I think there is a recipe for peace, where it would mean both a way to respect and participate in civilization instead of trying to rule over its ashes.
Social status is a measure of something like the average desirability of everyone else to be your friend.
It does has causal power in the minds of people how actively think of it, as they actively relate to the concept. But for other people who don’t think of it, social status is a composite measure that correlates to things, but does not actually have any effect on anything.
When it comes to human status, and group status dynamics. Surprised there isn't more references to Robert Sapolsky and baboons. If you are going to make an evolutionary argument around humans and status, think his work would be at least referenced.
I’d rather pursue money than social status. I don’t care about what other people think. A higher social status often creates unnecessary enemies and problems.
And the best way to money is often unknown to most people. Loose lips sink ships.
I think having a lot of money but being anonymous and not caring about what people think of you - would actually give you “high status” in a lot of groups. :p
Being a person of low social status and with no resources, suicide is a constant temptation. The article reads like a horror story on human nature and is a reminder for why I wish to be dead.
I believe americans are obsessed with status as some sort of social marketplace. But it seems that technological societies place less of importance on status. Apart from business CEOs, and academics (where status is mandatory for survival), most technologists don't appear to be obsessed with status. People go about with nicknames, you rarely see "credits" pages in applications, and most of the world's best engineers are not known outside their small circle.
The most socialist societies seem to place a lot of emphasis on the process and less on status , making people interchangeable
As for whether social status increases number of offspring in today's world, please show me the data to support this instead of making wild extrapolations from thousands of years ago.
[+] [-] culebron21|2 years ago|reply
The two most promiment names, that this text doesn't even mention, are Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu. Goffman systemized a lot of social interactions. Pierre Bourdieu focused on classes and their reproduction.
Instead, a lot of authors and laymen theorize by building a bridge from, say, macroeconomics and geopolitics, directly into human psychology or bio-psychology, deriving big trends and state structures from simple knee-jerk-like psychological reflexes.
[+] [-] jychang|2 years ago|reply
What simple introductionary readings/videos on Goffman and Bourdieu would you recommend?
[+] [-] _glass|2 years ago|reply
I think we in the social sciences with our departure from positivism are unable to produce clear laws, or direct applications, we're more concerned with understanding, and not explaining.
I think I am just expanding on your point.
[+] [-] gsatic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philprx|2 years ago|reply
any reco? ;-))
btw, I found "The Prince" by Machiavelli very telling on social dynamics: basic you will say, but that kind of fits my TLDR needs ;-)
[+] [-] HPsquared|2 years ago|reply
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01378-2
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.94.11.5939
[+] [-] amelius|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|2 years ago|reply
Like: "We tamed ourselves by weeding out bullies and domineering males throughout our evolutionary history. Humans organized egalitarian societies, and any male that violated this too much was subsequently the victim of a targeted killing."
Women competing with with other women using dominance behavior like bullying is a very common behavior, and I doubt there is a parent with a teenage daughter or teacher who has not observed this. We can also see this in apes, with female to female dominance behavior being one if not the biggest causes of death for female baboons. To continue with animal observations, male baboons have a different form of dominance behavior, and their behavior also result in dead baboons. Female aggression is about depriving the lower ranked females of food, water, sleep and grooming (together with some amount of bites and scratches), while male aggression is primarily about major injuries sustained during fights. If we define the latter as the single definition of aggression and dominance then the other form becomes invisible to us.
Going down further in the article, they define power as access to and control of resources. Not access to and control of people. This in order to say that women don’t have a strong craving for power because "obtaining power entails the risk of being disliked, and, unlike status, power has few social payoffs". It uses an exclusively male definition for power.
Here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237101081_Female_Do...') is a study done on dominance behavior in female vs male hierarchies. It basically fully invalidates most of this article's claims on male vs female behavior in terms of dominance. It does not seem to use a male-centric definition of dominance.
I am not all against this article. It is a fairly in-depth description of the topic and an interesting read. I would however advise to consider some of the terminology and definitions to be a bit limited, and occasionally leading the reader into misconceptions by trying to use a single definition for both men and women.
[+] [-] vjk800|2 years ago|reply
This quote is horribly wrong anyway. Human history, even before agriculture and industrialization, is filled with tribal wars. Maybe it would be more right to say that the aggressive bullies have historically had an outlet for their aggression: killing the aggressive bullies of other tribes. If aggressiveness were absolutely useless personality trait in past societies, it would have been weeded out by the evolution a long time ago.
[+] [-] User23|2 years ago|reply
This is also why teen girls are so prone to ostracism. A higher status girl risks her own status by hanging out with an ostracized girl.
That’s not to say we don’t see the same patterns among males, they are just less pronounced.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guerrilla|2 years ago|reply
This is delusional anyway. We're by far the most unegalitarian of all animal species besides maybe things like ants. We have individuals that command entire countries worth of resources and armies to go with.
[+] [-] javajosh|2 years ago|reply
Society (especially now) will approves of a woman's destruction of her target, seeing it as a positive example of "female empowerment", independent of any other fact of the case other than gender. In other words, there is social pressure that encourages females to become domineering bullies. At the same time, causal misandry encourages this false idea that women are somehow excluded from a wide variety of the worst of human behavior, the same behaviors that are actively encouraged in women! This is in addition to the fact that women's anger, violence, sexual assault (especially against children), is very real and, I believe, wildly under-reported.
[+] [-] dash2|2 years ago|reply
I think the first paper about this stuff was:
Henrich J, Gil-White FJ: The evolution of prestige: freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/culture_cognition_coev...
There's a review here: http://joeytcheng.com/s/dominance-prestige-leveling.pdf
[+] [-] jychang|2 years ago|reply
But I see it as a useful construct to delineate the differences regardless, because it maps pretty easily onto the traditional question of “is it better to be feared or loved”? Most people have been exposed to Machiavelli in one way or another, and understand the distinction between the carrot and stick.
[+] [-] logicchains|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madaxe_again|2 years ago|reply
Uh. All recorded history would suggest otherwise. Humans love bullies, strongmen, charlatans who promise panaceas at the wave of a stick.
What humans actually don’t like are bullies outside of the current established and expected hierarchy - bullies that threaten their bully.
Prestige and dominance are an utter time-sink, and the reward curve is hideously steep - unless you are at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy, you grind to stay afloat - whereas at the top, prestige and dominance magnetically attract to you.
I think a lot of what we take as being the default condition isn’t - we see all these behaviours and we assume it’s something innate to us and other primates - but I think it’s cultural and Malthusian, rather than a hard-baked desire for primacy.
The hard-baked desire is for survival - and prestige play is a minmax route to this for most people living in a society - it’s easier than setting up your own society. With blackjack. And…
Anyway. Ramblings. My perspective emerges from stepping sideways off the highway of life:
I once strove for status, and garnered no small amount. Didn’t do a damned thing for me - the hierarchy may as well be infinite.
I have found that I enjoy having less than zero status, as there’s nothing to lose, no plays to make, no maintenance payments to be made - here, everyone thinks I am a pauper, possibly mentally defective, definitely helplessly living in squalor off the land like our ancestors. The reality is somewhat different, but I’m content for others to think otherwise. I spent far too much of my life being dogged by high expectations.
I’m a sample of one, but I can’t help but try to examine why I feel as I do - and I think the answer is that I derive my security entirely outside of interpersonal relationships - I don’t owe anyone anything, nor they me, and I need nothing from them.
So… is status “real”? I doubt it. I think it’s just a manifestation of fear and insecurity, and a primal need for a parent figure who can protect and guide.
Perhaps the latter - parents - are also an important part of the need for social hierarchy, as they’re also an element I lacked, being largely raised by impersonal, militarised institutions.
[+] [-] zmgsabst|2 years ago|reply
That’s the whole point of a hierarchy, to mediate disputes other than the raw exercise of power — and conflicts become sudden and unexpected if insufficient status is granted to those able to wield power. This is a corollary to your point about outsider bullies; if someone strong isn’t integrated into the hierarchy, violence isn’t predictable and hence survival less assured.
Outside of that, I can’t say that “The Game” has held any particular appeal to me — and I dislike many of the status seekers I’ve met.
[+] [-] jychang|2 years ago|reply
Like you said, the parenting aspect is crucial- that’s been well established in mainstream psychology for a long time now.
The opposite of insecurity is trust (either in oneself or others), and this is difficult to develop later in life. There is research into this nowadays, anywhere from cognitive science psychology to MDMA assisted PTSD treatments to develop self-trust, but conclusive understanding still evades humanity at this point in time.
I do think most people who are very intelligent in terms of IQ, but have other issues… end up in a similar situation as you. Smart enough to overthink and realize where they exist in society, not smart enough to solve the problem when the solution is supposed to be handed to them from their ancestors.
That’s not an insult by the way- Einstein was smart enough to create relativity, but he had algebra and calculus etc handed to him from his ancestors. I doubt Einstein would have invented relativity from scratch.
I wonder if it’s possible to capture the key essence of parenting and re-teach people critical information that’s supposed to be taught in childhood. We all know about language acquisition and the critical period, after which if a child is not taught, they end up like Genie (the feral child, born 1957). But I suspect there are other social skills that are supposed to be taught, but commonly are not taught by parents, or simply unable to be taught if the parents do not exist.
[+] [-] vonnik|2 years ago|reply
Indeed, entire industries that are high-visibility can get away with paying in prestige rather than money at the entry level. Think low- to no-pay internships. In addition to academia, this includes the top journalism outlets (well-known websites, magazines, etc); fashion houses; and political campaigns.
The second order effect of these industries and organizations paying in prestige is to limit the pool of people in such entry level jobs to those who can afford it. Yes, you see some working-class people there, but you see many children of the elite. And that is how a certain class reproduces its dominance across highly visible cultural and political industries.
At the extreme, there is an element of potlatch in accepting no-pay jobs. Sam Altman's amazing interaction with Senator Kennedy during the AI hearings is a good example of that. Sam can afford to take no pay, and that makes him immune to a certain kind of criticism, augmenting his prestige and influence.
[+] [-] theelous3|2 years ago|reply
This might be true for the author but is very presumptuous imo.
I spend approximately no time per day judging others or interrogating my social status. I of course think about other people, but there are many ways to think about others. There are many ways to think about yourself.
I guess it's not surprising the author of a piece on status has a highly status alined thought process, but it's not by a longshot the default mode for everyone.
> But if you say you want to be promoted because you want respect, that’s often regarded as an appropriate desire.
I would think the same in each case. If someone doesn't think they have respect because of their job title, or they think they have it for the inverse, I feel bad for them. If I meet you on a monday and you're an x, and tuesday you're an x+1, in my eyes you're the same person. Similarly if I meet people for the first time. I honestly don't think I'm being particularly contrarian on this. I know idiot ceos, intelligent homeless people, and some kind of everyone in between. This whole take strikes me as naive to the nature of people.
Even the author of some other quoted book has weird priors I completely disagree with:
> for many of us this price is simply too high; we’d rather be low on the totem pole than be perceived as arrogant and domineering
If you're arrogant and domineering _you are low on the totem pole_. It's really interesting to see that this author is putting someone "high" on the totem pole because of some singular status markers like job title / situational power regardless of their behaviour. It says a lot.
It's not that I don't think status is real. I just don't believe it can be gained by maxmimising any one or even some multiple of typical status markers.
Idk. I just find this surreal.
[+] [-] replete|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrPatan|2 years ago|reply
I wonder if it's more useful to a certain kind of person for whom this stuff may be less readily legible, but I suspect there's a lot of that kind here.
Read impro.
[+] [-] mettamage|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2-718-281-828|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oofnik|2 years ago|reply
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who successfully climbed the social hierarchy from dysfunctional foster childhood to Ivy league deserves every ounce prestige he earned.
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
That's a problem with blog posts. A dated, but amusing book length expansion on this topic is "Class", by Paul Fussell.
[+] [-] throw4847285|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|2 years ago|reply
The psychological definition he uses where power is "control of access to resources" is an ok model. Separating it from status and prestige is key, where he gives the example of olympic athletes vs. nightclub bouncers, where each have high or low status and high or low power respectively.
Conferring power on low status people is a recipe for disaster, where those people will find ways to apply the power to an infinite need for status - without regard for the human desire that confers its legitimacy. It's what makes a lot of the current crop of establishment aspirants so uncanny, they have seized the reins of institutions, but are themselves personally undesirable because they have nothing of their own to share - it's all over leveraged and competing to supplicate themselves. Arguably, the tension in the culture is that there are no good men or good women in institutional power today, and so much so that people in power are trying to erase what "good" even means because it is a source of humiliation for them. They will try arbitrarily to destroy people who have the organic status that their own power does not give them. Never underestimate the capacity of undesirable people for cruelty, it's what the cold war was fought over, imo.
Becoming higher status is a straightforward process of self improvement, where through exercise, education, practice and competence, you become more desirable to others, and the resources you have are ones that are yours to share. There is no mystery there.
The interesting question to me is, given power is rarely ever converted into desirable status, how is status converted into power? We used to call it "convening power," where royalty and celebrities could get people in a room together. If an invitation came from them, it would be accepted, and brokering that meeting (and taking some equity) was how to convert status into power. But if there were a way to convert it directly, I think there is a recipe for peace, where it would mean both a way to respect and participate in civilization instead of trying to rule over its ashes.
[+] [-] reliablereason|2 years ago|reply
It does has causal power in the minds of people how actively think of it, as they actively relate to the concept. But for other people who don’t think of it, social status is a composite measure that correlates to things, but does not actually have any effect on anything.
[+] [-] smabie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Archelaos|2 years ago|reply
Most of his famous works date from the twentieth century.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nyolfen|2 years ago|reply
the author went on to cowrite a well-received pop-sci book about social signaling theory that i highly recommend as well, the elephant in the brain
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlieyu1|2 years ago|reply
And the best way to money is often unknown to most people. Loose lips sink ships.
[+] [-] molly0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubefox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellyer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] seydor|2 years ago|reply
The most socialist societies seem to place a lot of emphasis on the process and less on status , making people interchangeable
As for whether social status increases number of offspring in today's world, please show me the data to support this instead of making wild extrapolations from thousands of years ago.