Not all signalling/status behaviors are bad

Stabilizer

As I've recently been understanding signalling/status behaviors common among humans and how they can cloud reality, I've had a tendency to automatically think of these behaviors as necessarily bad. But it seems to me that signalling behaviors are pretty much a lot of what we do during our waking life. If you or I have abstract goals: become better at physics, learn to play the guitar, become fit and so forth, these goals may fundamentally be derived from evolutionary drives and therefore their implementation in real life would probably make heavy use of signalling/status urges as primary motivators. But that does not necessarily reduce the usefulness of these behaviors in achieving these abstract goals^1,2.

I suppose what we need to be cautious about are inefficiencies. Signalling/status behaviors may not be the optimal way to achieve these goals. We would have to weigh the costs of actively ignoring your previous motivators and cultivating new motivators against the benefit we would gain by having motivations more aligned to our abstract goals.

Any common examples of behaviors that assist and/or thwart goal-achievement? I've got one: health. Abstract goal: We want to be healthy and fit. Status/Signalling urge: desire to look good. The urge sometimes assists, as people try to exercise to look good, which makes you healthier. Sometimes it thwarts, like in the extreme example of anorexia. Has anybody made personal trade-offs?

^Note:

^{1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.}

^{2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.}

^Note:

^{1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.}

^{2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.}

Great comment.

It's not just improving your skills when you're already an adult that's a status loss. Nobody faults a top 100 professional tennis player for trying to get better, and in fact the commentators often lavish praise upon the most hard-working ones as being mature, ambitious, high-quality individuals.

It's starting from ground zero that's the problem. I learned this the hard way when I tried basketball. I started tennis from a young age, and spent my incompetent years as a child. With basketball though, I attempted playing it for the first time when I was already an adult, and it was a serious social shock.

I was used to being treated with respect on the tennis court, but none of the people I played basketball with knew who I was, or knew anything about me (because it was just at some large gym with a full basketball court and a ton of people who came to play). They didn't just treat me like I was a newbie; they treated me like I deserved no respect at all (or rather many did--there were at least a few nice people).

As you said, it's OK to be low status as a child (because they're just naturally low status), but it gets socially intractable when you reach adulthood. We may literally be wired to "see the first steps in mastering any skill as childish". I cringe when I imagine learning a new skill from the ground up and being watched and judged while doing so. This is certainly an area where our status hardware is dangerously mis-aligned for our current environment.

In the ancestral environment, one could imagine that it would have been counter-productive for an individual to decide to do a "career change". Learning a new skill that didn't have sufficient micro-skill carry-over from one's old specialty to allow one to excel at a sufficiently adult-like level right away would have been a waste of one's prior skill, and a detriment to the tribe. Perhaps it may have been optimal for the children to find their comparative advantage at a young age, and then simply stick to it.

It's not just improving your skills when you're already an adult that's a status loss. Nobody faults a top 100 professional tennis player for trying to get better...

Yes, the exact rules are a bit more complex. Seems to me like it's OK to practice if you already have much better results. The good results are high-status... and whetever else the person does is colored by the halo effect. If they work diligently, we should praise them for their work. But I guess that even if they would do nothing and yet deliver superior results, we should praise them for ... (read more)

2Alicorn14y

Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in years (and I was never any good at it). I did very poorly. Small children zipped by me on the ice. It occurred to me that this situation could have been embarrassing, but I didn't happen to feel embarrassed. I vaguely remember consciously editing out that reaction to that sort of situation, and think it was in response to my dad reacting badly to expressions of such embarrassment when I was years younger than I am now (maybe 12-15) but still older than others who would have been in beginner-classes-of-things I could have joined.

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Not all signalling/status behaviors are bad

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Not all signalling/status behaviors are bad

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