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lessdazed comments on Open Thread: September 2011 - Less Wrong
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Edit: Original version moved to karma sink to hide it away and leave it available for reference. New version:
Is what we refer to as "status" always best thought of as relative? Is a person's status like shares in a corporation or money in an economy, where the production of more diminishes what they have and does not create wealth? Is it an ability to compel others and resist compulsion? Or is it more like widgets, where if I happen to lose out from you getting more widgets, it is only because of secondary effects like your ability to out-compete me with your widgets?
I am not trying to find a really true definition of "status". To some, it seems right to answer the question "Is status all relative or is status not all relative?" with "It depends on which reasonable meaning of status you mean." Everyone (?) agrees that a valid way of discussing status is to talk about something like what portion of the total (subcategory of) status a person has.
Not everyone agrees that there is a reasonable meaning by which one might speak of non-relative status, other than the one that is shorthand for ignoring small or infinitesimal losses by others. In the same way we may say "The government printed one million dollars and gave it to an agency, no one else lost or gained anything." It's fine to say that, but only because: a) the inflation caused by printing a million dollars is miniscule, b) we can count on the listener to infer that increasing money does not increase wealth in that way.
So if one's answer is "It depends," then one thinks it is more than just linguistically valid to think about status in terms of an absolute that can be increased or decreased, but literally, logically, true. Not everyone agrees with that, and the poll is to get a general feel for how many here think each way.
So, as a hypothetical: A person in a room magically becomes awesome - say a guy has knowing kung fu downloaded into his brain, and he tells everyone, and they believe him. Does it make any sense at all to say that the status of others has not changed, other than in a way susceptible to a money/inflation/wealth (simple truth sheep/rock) metaphor?
Poll:
Status all is relative
Status is not all relative
My intuition is that status is meaningful relative to other people's, so this is similar to the inflation of a currency. In all the ways that status can be used to get people to do things, there isn't any more or less of it.
Whether or not the others help em depends on the temperature of the island. Like I said before, my intuition is that status is relative. If they do help em, ey gains some amount of status relative to them. If they don't, ey loses a similar amount of status.
EDIT: The following is based on a misinterpretation of lessdazed.
Assuming you mean third island: The other people help em, and ey gains a bit of status in the process. Ey now has slightly more status than the others. The reverse happens on the fourth island.
I clarified the scenarios, they weren't typos.
Could someone please explain the response to this comment? What I'm most curious about are the responses to the attached poll replies. Multiple people have downvoted each entry in the poll without comment. This ruins the poll for the participants, as one can no longer tell how many people have voted for each option. Do not do this on polls until either LW shows more than net votes, or there is a better way to poll.
I also don't understand downvoting this comment without criticizing it and helping me fix its problems. I have discussed this topic with several LW participants and have gotten each of the two types of responses multiple times, and I think a previously undiscussed issue that gets divergent intuitions from people who theretofore have believed themselves having very similar philosophies is potentially interesting. If I am not criticized, I do not know how to improve. It is currently sitting at -2 but it has been upvoted several times as well, five or more people have downvoted without comment.
I'm not shy about posting things in discussion if I think they merit it, but I didn't think this topic did, so I posted it in the open thread. If this issue is not appropriate for an open thread, where is it appropriate for?
I've not downvoted you, nor participated in the poll, but...
...your question about how relative 'status' is, reminds me of debates about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound. Depends how one defines the word. You don't seem to have an option in your poll for "Depends how one defines 'status' ".
...also you seem to be first posing a detailed specific scenario with a concrete question about what happens with the fires on the first and second islands -- but then the polls don't offer that specific, concrete question, they offer the vague "status is relative/not all relative" questions instead. Which seems you want to jumble different questions together, or making people seem to support one thing by answering another. Or something.
In short it all seems a bit muddled. Mind you, as I said, I wasn't among the people downvoting this, so I don't know their own reasoning behind their votes.
Thank you for your feedback!
I am not used to making up intuition pumps. I will try to become better at writing them.
This is a legitimate response, and I certainly didn't intend to debate or try and discover the true meaning of a word. However, it consists of the claim that for somewhat reasonable definitions of "status", "status is all relative" is true, and for others, "status is not all relative" is true. I consider that equivalent to "status is not all relative" - something I will make clear. By "status is all relative" I mean something like: "for no reasonable (to me, though this is something I expect others can guess at with good accuracy) definition of status is status anything but relative".
Part of the difficult expressing this is part of why I resorted to examples, and I do take to heart that difficulty expressing an idea is often a sign it isn't coherent.
I edit the post to try again.
One user upvoted "Status is not all relative", two users upvoted "Status is all relative", those three users downvoted the karma sink, and three other users downvoted all three comments.
Thank you very much!
Status is all relative
Status is not all relative
Status isn't the only variable in these scenarios. One can feel more or less bonded to someone independent of status, for example.
Or one person could have a firearm, or a conch shell.
Assume variables not mentioned are constant.
But they wouldn't be constant given what you describe which makes me skeptical of the intuitions provoked. The fire is probably more likely to get built cooperatively on the island where the jokes got laughs-- but that has to do with bonding and mood, not status.
Good point. What example of status changing can I use to best clarify I'm talking about just one variable?
I will try mentioning varying ways of gaining status, each with side effects, and specify that only one variable is considered. Hopefully someone can think of a single good scenario.
I can't really think of a scenario where total status could be raised or lowered-- because I think status is (obviously) always relative. Independent of coming up with intuition pumps I'd like to know if there are people who disagree with this-- it is a shame your poll was ruined.
I define status to be "your ability to be treated favorably, all else being equal." I regard bonding as a form of status - members of the in-group have more status than the outgroup. A group of three strangers on an island has collectively less status than the same group after they've bonded. Once they've bonded, they are all willing to do each other favors and treat each other nicely in ways that they weren't willing to before. In my mind, this is entire point of status.
You can define status as "how much more ability to be treated favorably you have compared to other people," but I don't think that's a useful definition. The word "status" has gain popularity particularly because it flexibly describes a wide array of social interactions.
Status SYMBOLS are often zero-sum (buying a big TV makes people want to come over to your house more often to watch football games, and this only works if your TV is bigger than other people's). But those are only one form of status-gain.
(I spoke to less dazed in real life about this. Our conversation was the impetus for this thread)
Beware 'defining' things too early.
I think that after multiple years of discussing the word status on this site, we BETTER start actually defining it. If there are disagreements as to the definition we need to get them out into the open, so that at the very least we can start mentally translating "Raemon-Status" and "Jack-Status".
Luckily, we speak a natural language (English) here which lets us use words without having to define them each time we use them and instead refer to our collective understanding as English speakers to tell us what a word means. Conveniently, this collective understanding is routinely organized into books and databases consisting of words and their meanings. Now sometimes these definitions are ambiguous or different from each other and sometimes we use technical words so obscure they don't appear in such databases. On occasion we may even decide to use a word in an unusual context. In these circumstances we better start defining terms.
Thankfully, the discussion of social status is not one of those cases.
Wikipedia: "In sociology or anthropology, social status is the honor or prestige attached to one's position in society (one's social position). It may also refer to a rank or position that one holds in a group, for example son or daughter, playmate, pupil, etc."
Oxford dictionaries: "the relative social, professional, or other standing of someone or something:an improvement in the status of women high rank or social standing:those who enjoy wealth and status
Britannica which wikipedia plagiarized or vice versa: "social status, also called status, the relative rank that an individual holds, with attendant rights, duties, and lifestyle, in a social hierarchy based upon honour or prestige."
Dictionary.com: "the position of an individual in relation to another or others, especially in regard to social or professional standing."
I could go through anthropology and sociology papers and talk about how they use the word. I could quote Max Weber, too. I think that would be overkill, though. I'm open to an argument that this is "not what we really mean" when we use the word 'status' but I tend to assume people here are just using the regular English word... so you can see how I would have a hard time seeing how status could be non-relative.
We've been talking about intelligence for a long time too, but I haven't seen a good definition for it. Sometimes its better not to try to define things and just say "well here are some examples of things I mean when I say status".
I agree. I think something more like: status is ability to influence or resist influence for social, non-environmental reasons, not covered by other relationship categories such as lust or love - if you have a super-laser-of-doom-and-evil on the moon pointed at the Earth, you may have influence, but not status.
Lets say that humans have special circuits for figuring out if a person is more like the band leader or more like the band outcast. Human minds use these circuits to change their behavior towards that person. It seems plausible that those circuits can be 'gamed' , say people get into the habit of speaking badly about people who don't exist, then perhaps everyone actually existing will seem high status.
Clever- and it seems like this could plausibly make everyone feel better about themselves (though, of course they'll still feel bad when they compare themselves to even higher status people). Note though that this is like making someone popular by giving them imaginary friends-- it's not how the word is ordinarily used. But if this is what people have in mind by 'raising net status', fine, I don't see anything implausible about it.
Two grim-trigger strategies are playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma over a noisy telephone line. One mishears the other as saying "defect", and they switch from both always cooperating to both always defecting.
I'm missing the connection.
So you're saying two people, in a closed system, were able to influence the other to cooperate but are no longer able to, and "status" is the ability to influence, and ability to influence has been lowered?
If so, I think in this case "ability to influence" was for environmental rather than social reasons. The words on the line describe how the environment will react to an individual's cooperation/defection.
I see status as more ability to influence or resist influence for social, non-environmental reasons - if you have a super-laser-of-doom-and-evil on the moon pointed at the Earth, you may have influence, but not status.
Maybe I have something different in mind when I say "status". To the extent that an agent's treatment of an opponent is based on some sort of persistent state, rather than on the opponent's local behavior, I would say that that state is a form of status information. (Thus, one can have a status with a grim trigger, but not with a tit-for-tat.)
In humans (and I conjecture in approximately-winful strategies generally?), status tends to be one-dimensional, with one end eliciting "do nice things for this person" behavior, and the other end eliciting "do mean things to this person" behavior.
I finally got some criticism and I tried to correct the problems. Do you think the spirit of the post was preserved?