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Roko comments on Missed opportunities for doing well by doing good - Less Wrong
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Thanks for bringing this issue up. I had thought of addressing it in the body of my main post but decided against it because it was already getting kind of long.
•It's best for people who value improving the world and their relative status within their communities to spend their time in communities where improving the world is correlated with increased status. For example, people in this situation who live in a materialistic suburb like Orange County, CA might do well to move to a university town (like Santa Cruz, CA) where excessive materialism is frowned upon and where a greater than usual percentage of the population thinks that making charitable donations is cool.
•Now, things being as they are, I agree that despite my above point, it's still not the case that "the best way to donate also just happens to be best for the average donor's happiness." This is because at present most people don't care about effective charity. In this connection, I think that what GiveWell is doing is important for two reasons:
(1) It's offering a community for people who do care about about effective charity. Members of this community can compete for relative status within the community by doing their best to maximize their positive social impact.
(2) By drawing attention to the case for effectiveness-oriented giving, GiveWell is working to push social norms in the population as a whole in the direction of higher emphasis on effectiveness-oriented giving. The more success that GiveWell has in this respect, the stronger the correlation will be between "engaging in effectiveness-oriented giving" and "raising relative status" even for the average donor.
How is that the implication? If the ranking was based on income, rather than on how the income was spent, what would your giving (or lack thereof) have to do with it?
I think you're wrong here. Being poor is bad for men, of course. Being weak is also bad for men.
But charitable giving actually can signal wealth (you have enough to give away), social class (depends on the charity, but for example think how frequently you hear about microfinance at an Ivy League school), and a kind of strength (you have your life together enough to think of others -- true incompetents are too busy with their own crises).
Charitable giving allows you to signal very high levels of wealth effectively, because you get newspaper coverage praising you for being able to donate millions (billions) of dollars. You don't get that kind of recognition for donating, say, ten thousand dollars, so if you aren't actually rich you get way more wealth signaling per dollar by buying clothes or club membership or a new car.
I think Roko's view is up in the air.
The evidence that "romantic priming increases charitable behavior in women (and in men it increases conspicuous consumption)" would be more probable if his hypothesis was true. If consumptive behavior rather than altruistic behavior is produced by romantic priming, that would be consistent with the former being more useful than the latter for romantic efforts. While this evidence is sufficient for me to locate Roko's hypothesis, I don't yet feel compelled.
There are tribes where men gain status by giving food away, so humans seem to have the potential to accord status to men for certain altruistic behavior in certain contexts. The U.S. is a different culture. Even here, I agree with you that there are ways that giving away things can signal wealth.
I'm willing to grant Roko the plausibility of certain forms of charitable giving reducing male status and attractiveness, though I also think there are ways it could have the opposite effect, depending on context, and the other characteristics of the man involved and the subculture he is in.
Mmmm. Rationalism.
Such a commitment is a form of signalling, like a peacock's tail. Someone who manages to keep that commitment can afford to do so, signaling wealth.
Roko:
It's much more complicated than that. By improper conspicuous consumption, you can easily end up signaling that you're a sucker. Even worse, you'll signal that you're the sort of sucker who's easy to separate from his money. You can probably imagine the possible consequences of that botched signal.
Generally speaking, effective conspicuous consumption is very difficult to pull off. This of course doesn't apply to the level of conspicuous consumption that you're expected to undertake to avoid coming off as a weirdo given your position in society, but anything beyond that is dangerously apt to backfire in a multitude of ways.
I can see that.
But is anyone wholly a bad boy? Without a single altruistic moment? I've never met such a person. Not even the ones who look like "bad boys" at the outset. And are you really going to put in the effort to become such a person, one hundred per cent arrogant, just to pick up women? That's your sole terminal value? If so, enjoy... but I think it's a rare man who remains so singularly obsessed even after he's proven to himself that he can succeed with women. Maybe I'm wrong.
How many comments with this sort of disclaimer end up downvoted on net? It seems like they're usually >0.
Is this a problem in peoples mental models of LessWrong, or does it cause people to think differently? If the latter, is that an improvement?
Whatever is going on, I don't think it's unique to LW-- on usenet, I noticed that whenever a post started with "I know I'm going to get flamed for this", it wouldn't get flamed and it wouldn't have anything in it which struck me as likely to get flamed.
I don't know if there's something disarming about posts which start with that sort of nervousness, or (more likely) that people who are that sort of cautious overestimate how provocative they're being.
Perhaps we should recruit some local firebrands to keep 2d6 with their computer and roll on every opinion they express in a comment, adding the disclaimer every time they get 12.
The fact that we know that they're doing this would probably invalidate the experiment, however.
So have them do it on Reddit.
This comment of mine is going to get downvoted because it will have contributed nothing to the discussion.
Upvoted for contributing to the discussion.
Upvoted for inviting recursion.
What Roko keeps on saying -- that women prefer high-status men -- has a lot of truth to it, but there are countervailing considerations:
(1) [deleted for being an unimportant distraction]
(2) Men under 23 or so are given a pass: current income and current social status are not major considerations of most women contemplating a romance with a man under that age. Of course, it helps to seem to have prospects of high income or high social status, but most women are not particularly good judges of male prospects (and know that about themselves) and most men will be able to clear the prospects hurdle just by being a full-time college student or having a degree -- and if that is not enough in the way of prospects for a particular woman, then having a father or even an uncle with high income or high social status will probably be.
(3) Since women who will go for a man under 23 or so typically place a lot of premium on high intelligence, if you are reading this web site, then unless you have some severe romantic handicap, if you make the usual level of effort to initiate romances when you are under 23 or so, there is a good chance that you find yourself in a romance with at least one woman who will want to stay with you for the rest or your life. (Roko is probably not interested in that: he probably wants to have romances with many, many women who scores as high as possible on the criterion most popular with men who want to have romances with many, many women. Hence his strong emphasis on social status.)
(4) Some women do not care much about income or social status. I have had two long-term relationships during a period in which I was chronically ill and my extremely-low income came entirely from Social Security disability payments plus in the case of relationship #2 federal housing subsidies. I was 27 when I started the first of these two relationships and 44 when I started the second. (Both of these women were very attracted to the fact that I was good at science, BTW. One hid the fact that my being good at science was an attractive property (I had to piece it together after we broke up) and even hid the correlated fact that she found science fiction inspiring, but then again I probably never brought sci fi up in conversation.)
(5) Among the women who care about your income and your position in society, most care about your level of social dominance more. The main determinants of social dominance are interpersonal skills that you can probably learn faster and with much less trouble than you can acquire high income or impressive position in society. To help with this learning, classes are available (e.g., in pickup, improvisation comedy (which is largely about status and dominance signalling) and the martial arts).
(6) On the subject of altruism and philanthropy specifically, being around a woman for long periods of time greatly increases your romantic chances with her. For this reason, one of the people who blog about pickup (Roissy I think) advises men to choose work in which attractive women outnumber men. Most kinds of philanthropy are like that. (I attended BIL PIL 2009 (BIL for the medical industry), and there were a striking number of beautful, intelligent, very inspiring women there (half of whom were in philanthropic organizations) -- and one of them seemed willing to continue talking to me as long as I wanted to talk, knowing about me only that I was attending BIL PIL 2009 and that I had an interest (not a career, just an interest, expressed by me with a sense of confidence in my abilities) in the application of computer-science research to philanthropy.)
Roko is using "status" in a much broader sense than income or job status. I think he is mainly addressing status in interpersonal interactions within the particular social milieu a man is in, e.g. who asserts themselves over who, who defers to who, etc... These sorts of status hierarchies start in childhood.
If someone believes that their social circles don't have hierarchies, then think again. Even nice, egalitarian social circles have hierarchies; they are just subtle. For an example, if you and your friends are going out to dinner, who decides where? If there is a disagreement about what restaurant, who decides? Which lone group members are able to sway the entire group towards their preferences, and which can't? When the bill comes, someone suggests dividing it equally even though some people ordered less expensive dishes. Can those group members assert that the bill should be divided differently?
None of the answers to these questions necessarily "prove" a particular ranking among every group of friends (for instance, some people just don't like making decisions regardless of status; in some groups, the high status people might make these decisions, while in others, the high status people might push the decision work onto the lower status people.) Yet these are the kind of situations that can reveal subtle dominance battles.
When I am out with a single friend, or sometimes two, I tend to pick where we go unless I don't want to (due to not knowing what's available), break ties, successfully arrange to split appetizers I don't want to eat by myself, and either pay for my own often-cheaper food or not pay at all.
This is because under these circumstances, I typically have Schellingesque limits on myself. I'm a vegetarian with certain strong food preferences beyond that which limit where I can and will eat, and will tend to stay home rather than go somewhere I can't eat. I'm very frugal with my money, and will tend to stay home rather than enter a situation where I have to pay for dinner out (or any more than what I deliberately choose to pay for after looking at the prices). To get me to go to a restaurant involves picking one I expect to enjoy more than whatever I would cook for myself at home and buying me food there. I'm fairly difficult to take to dinner, actually, but people keep doing it anyway; I guess it's too much of a cultural staple to discard.
I don't think this is due to status, though, as I don't have nearly the same group-swaying power if I go out with several friends, even when individually each of them would do as I pleased restaurant-wise one-on-one. I can sometimes still get someone to pay my way, but if and only if I am clearly the guest of just one person. (I can get my date to pay for me even on a double date; when I was staying with a friend over a summer and the deal was that she bought my food she paid for restaurant meals too even if we ate with a larger bunch of people.) I don't always just stay home when a large group organizes a meal out because in that case I feel antisocial and whiny, and even when I do stay home, this lacks the ability to sway large groups (I think they think "she just didn't feel like coming" instead of "we have not adequately satisfied her preferences and should work harder at it because we are her friends who should be able to have dinner at a restaurant with her").
Edit: Sometimes a single person takes it upon him or herself to pay for everybody in a largeish group. I'm never this person, and have never in my memory been left out of such a collective payment. Paying for everybody seems to me like a high-status move.
tl;dr: I have complicated restaurant preferences and can get them met with individuals but not always groups.
The comic is drawn from the same fairyland, and citing fictional evidence is just more propaganda.
Speaking of being stuck in signalling mode, what else is this: "I know it's going to get downvoted (but I am a sucker for telling the truth)"?
I prefer to describe it as "loser shit".
And yet, for some reason, you seem determined to signal that you're weak, by caring about this. ;-)
And yet, the study didn't ask people how they perceived their rank, it simply ranked them by actual income.
So again, I don't see how you can create this implication out of thin air from the study.
Heck, the study doesn't even prove that high income rank creates happiness - it could just as easily be that the happiest people within a peer group will also tend towards the highest income.
Wrong. People who want other people to think they're rich engage in conspicuous consumption. Actual rich people (at least first-generation rich), not so much.
That would be quite useless, if you haven't first determined whether it's relative happiness increasing relative income, or vice versa.
It seems very plausible to me that the belief that giving to inefficient charities doesn't count as altruism would prevent one from gaining the more efficient fuzzies offered by inefficient charities and cause giving to efficient charities to count as altruism.
I don't think studies (which may well combine results for people with very different temperaments) should completely override individual experience.
Also, it's stated in the article that most people spend their money very inefficiently. It should be possible to give a good bit to charity without impacting one's status unless you assume that spending according to one's station is completely defined by the spending habits of everyone else in a similar situation.
My assumption is that people generally don't think clearly about how they spend their money, including whether they're pursuing status efficiently.
I think we're considering two different standards for pursuing status. I'm suggesting that people could give a good bit to charity while pursuing status as effectively as others who have the same income. Additionally, they might be able to pursue status more effectively if they get the sort of psychological boost that multifoliaterose does.
It's conceivable that someone who put a comparable amount of thought into pursuing status could do better than others with the same income if they didn't give to charity, which I think is what you mean.
Just for the record, I think pursuing status is a major human motivation, but hardly the only one.