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Nornagest comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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While I don't fully disagree, I'm not sure that's a meaningful objection. One implication of the status-signaling frame is that our instinctive emotional responses (among other cognitive patterns) are calibrated at least partly in terms of maximizing status; it doesn't require any conscious attention to status at all, let alone an explicit campaign of manipulation.
Well, I think that self-signaling especially - and likely even signaling to very close people like family members too - is one of the basic needs of humans, and, being as entangled with human worldview as it is, deserves to be counted under the blanket term "emotional response".
Even granting that, it's still true that if Nornagest is right and my emotional responses are calibrated in terms of expected status-maximization, then it makes sense to consider emotional responses in terms of (among other things) status-maximization for legal purposes.
We clearly need to find out what kinds of emotional responses are calibrated by what adaptations in what proportion. Nominating status-seeking as the most important human drive here out of the blue just seems unjustified to me in this moment.
There's a tradition of examining that frame here that's probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it's related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don't think it's a complete model; it's fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it's best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the "frame" descriptor.
I have a suspicion that we'll only be able to produce any totalizing model that's much good after we crack human intelligence in general. I mean, look at all this entangled mess.
Well, "that's much good" is the tough part. It's not at all hard to make a totalizing model, and only a little harder to make one that's hard to disprove in hindsight (there are dozens in the social sciences) but all the existing ones I know of tend to be pretty bad at prediction. The status-seeking model is one of the better ones -- people in general seem more prone to avoiding embarrassment than to maximizing expected money or sexual success, to name two competing models -- but it's far from perfect.
Yup. My point exactly.
Well, couching things in terms of status-signaling is conventional around here. But, sure, there are probably better candidates. Do you have anything in particular in mind you think should have been nominated instead?
Nothing in particular, no, just skepticism. A (brief, completely uneducated) outside view of the field especially suggests that elegant-sounding theories of the mind are likely to fail bad at prediction sooner or later.