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NihilCredo comments on Fight Zero-Sum Bias - Less Wrong
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I agree that there's something to what you're saying.
Your comment gives me occasion to make a point that I had been intending to make later. I anticipate that some people will argue that since status is zero-sum and since humans crave status, zero-sum bias still helps humans get what they want. To this imagined argument (not made by you), I would respond that to a large degree, humans don't crave status, they crave the feelings historically correlated with status, and achieving these feelings is not a zero-sum game.
Similarly, historically the quest for reproductive resources was a zero sum game, but (a) this is no longer the case, and (b) we do not crave reproductive resources for their own sake, we crave the feelings historically correlated with attaining reproductive resources, and the quest for these feelings is not a zero-sum game.
The status game is not entirely zero-sum either.
Could you elaborate or point to a link about status being positive sum?
Sure. You can imagine two seemingly equal tribes. One with much more advanced status structure, where the chief is more revered, where there is a shaman with his own charisma or high status, where every member has it's own higher then zero place. A kind of Vanity Fair, but non the less.
And we can play this game of status in a smaller groups as well. Vote me up, I'll vote you up and we will both gain the status. We will cut together a little bigger piece of karma cake for us.
A nationalist leader may tell his people, that they are special. If they decide to believe him, the status of everybody will go up. At least they will think so, but it's all that counts in the status game, anyway.
So it IS zero, since there is less cake for everybody else.
Helen Parr (to her son): "Everyone's special, Dash." Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is." -- the Incredibles
Exactly. A person can only be high status by being higher-status than someone else; so one person's high status must lead to another person's low status. So status must be zero-sum.
I have no trouble visualizing a society composed mostly of people with high status, or a society composed mostly of people with low status, with very different sums of total status.
I think we might be using different definitions of status. So instead of status, I'll say that social power is zero-sum.
Many people may share social power, especially if they don't choose to wield it often or to the detriment of others. I suppose you'd say that you count them as having it in exact proportion to their tendency to actually use it, or in terms of the power they'd likely have if they chose to war against one another.
No, the point is if someone gains social power, someone else must lose that power. Sharing of power is fine in this framework - if you share power over the tribe, for example, then you don't have full power over the tribe. For one, you don't have the same kind of power over the individuals with whom you are sharing power.
What if you construct more than one cake, then arrange distribution so everybody gets a bigger piece than somebody else on at least one cake. Thus, because of human tendency to emphasize what makes them feel good, people notice their privileged cake(s) and disregard their loss cake(s).
A real-world equivalent would be the religious concept of poorness as a virtue.
I think the issue is whether to use "relative status" or "absolute status".
For example using the karma example, it is not very important what the karma numbers are absolutely but what their relative value is. Thus a couple of friends voting each other up raise the average (+mode + whatever statistical marker one prefers). Thus while their absolute status rises the relative status of other people sinks.
I think we may have different notions of status with me thinking of "relative inside a given group".