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NancyLebovitz comments on Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? - Less Wrong
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They're just doing it to show off.
That wasn't just a joke, though to judge by the upvotes, it's a better joke than I thought it was.
Telling people that their motives are less reputable than they thought is a way of lowering their status and raising your own. It's tiresome from Marxists and Freudians, and at least for me, too much of it produces a feeling of intellectual claustrophobia. Motive-mongering can prove anything, involves unproven guesses about what other people are driven by, and leaves out major parts of the world.
In particular, status is about non-rational motives for acceding to people. If everyone was completely run by status considerations, nothing useful would be getting done. (There's that Gladwell essay I can't find which suggests that status competition is especially pernicious when people have nothing useful to do, as in high school, prisons, and the court of Louis XIV.)
Status is an important feature of how people live with each other, and it makes perfect sense to want enough skill at it to live a good life and accomplish what you care about.
However, there's got to be a complex interaction between status (some but not all of which is based on proving that you can afford to waste effort and resources) and accomplishment. I've brought up the subject a few times, but I don't seem to be able to get a grip on it, and no one else seems to have anything to say about it. Is it a non-problem, only interesting to me, or so hard that there's just nothing to say at this point?
A couple of questions about status-- how do you keep from being blinded by other people's high status? How do you notice valuable people who aren't good at status?
You may be thinking of Paul Graham. In "Why Nerds are Unpopular" he says:
Thank you. That's it. No wonder I couldn't find it by searching on Gladwell.
You might like this piece - The social rationality of footballers.
Thanks.
My impression is that there's more pressure in soccer than in other sports for the players to keep the game interesting, though (again a matter of impression) I thought that was more about tactics involving more than one member of the team, and possibly grace of motion.
Goalies throwing themselves to one side are probably more interesting to watch than goalies standing in the middle.
I'm less clear about whether kickers aiming low (a duel between the kicker and goalie) are more interesting than a high pressure moment in which the kicker aims high and gets the ball in or not.
I wonder whether that article will affect how player handle penalty kicks.
NancyLebovitz:
It is a very difficult and complex question, which can't be discussed in its full generality in a single comment. It certainly involves numerous perplexing and counterintuitive phenomena where it's hard to even begin analyzing the situation coherently.
Well, the only honest answers to both questions would be -- sometimes, possibly even often, I don't. But admitting that status is often a key force in shaping our beliefs that we nevertheless see as products of flawless logic and clear moral imperatives is a necessary condition to even begin disentangling our situation.
If you're willing to take a crack at the interactions between status and efficacy, I'm interested in seeing it.
I don't know, it's a really complex question. If I ever form anything approaching a sketch of a complete theory, I'll probably post it. But certainly no simple proposition will do.