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Yvain comments on Simultaneously Right and Wrong - Less Wrong
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Comments (52)
I agree with your first paragraph, but I don't quite understand your second.
In particular, I don't understand what you mean by there being no need to say he "believes". If upon being asked he would assert that his IQ is 100, and he wouldn't be consciously aware of lying, isn't that enough to say he believes his IQ is 100 on at least one level?
(also, when I say I agree with your first paragraph, I do so on the assumption that we mean the same thing by status. In particular, I would describe the "status" in this case as closer to "self-esteem" than "real position in a social hierarchy". Are most Less Wrong readers already aware of the theory that self-esteem is the way the calculation of status feels from the inside, or is that worth another post?)
Yes, it's worth another post - I hadn't heard that theory before.
::runs off to do some Google searches::
Some difficult work with Google revealed that the technical term is the "sociometer" theory - and it's fairly recent (the oldest citation I see refers to 1995), which would help explain why I hadn't heard of it before. It seems consistent with my personal experiences, so I consider it credible.
For more information:
http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Sociometer_Theory
Okay, I'll definitely post on sociometer theory sometime.
Why did I only stumble across this sentence two years after you wrote it?! It would've come in handy in the meanwhile, you know =) It will definitely come in handy now. Thanks!
Did Yvain end up writing said post? That theory is approximately how I model self-esteem and it serves me well but I haven't seen what a formal theory on the subject looks like.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1kr/that_other_kind_of_status/ involves that idea; for the formal theory, Google "sociometer".
Thanks!
If you've got more to say about it than that one line and you think it's possibly important, I'd call it another post.
I wasn't aware, but it makes a lot of sense. Especially because you perception of yourself is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Imagine a room of 100 people where none of them have any symbols pre-validated to signal for status. Upon interacting over time, I would guess that the high self-esteem people would most likely be perceived as high status.
Self-esteem is another one of those null concepts like "fear of success". In my own work, for example, I've identified at least 2 (and maybe three) distinct mental processes by which behaviors described as "low self-esteem" can be produced.
One of the two could be thought of as "status-based", but the actual mechanism seems more like comparison of behaviors and traits to valued (or devalued) behavioral examples. (For instance, you get called a crybaby and laughed at -- and thus you learn that crying makes you a baby, and to be a "man" you must be "tough".)
The other mechanism is based on the ability to evoke positive responses from others, and the behaviors one learns in order to evoke those responses. Which I suppose can also be thought of as status-based, too, but it's very different in its operation. Response evocation motivates you to try different behaviors and imprint on ones that work, whereas role-judgment makes you try to conceal your less desirable behaviors and the negative identity associated with them. (Or, it motivates you to imitate and display admired traits and behaviors.)
Anyway, my main point was just to support your comments about evidence and falsifiability: rationalists should avoid throwing around high-level psychological terms like "procrastination" and "self-esteem" that don't define a mechanism -- they're usually far too overloaded and abstract to be useful, ala "phlogiston". If you want to be able to predict (or engineer!) esteem, you need to know more than that it contains a "status-ative principle". ;-)
Oddly enough, I found that too abstract to follow.