Sarokrae comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Douglas_Reay 09 September 2012 04:41AM

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Comment author: Sarokrae 09 September 2012 12:11:03AM *  3 points [-]

Huh. Ok. What do you call the ape status-instinct then? That's thing that you get by cleverly body-language and verbally sparring with people. I've managed to end up on top of a number of authority figures doing that.

Edit: the human version of the behaviour that Wikipedia describes as "dominance hierarchies".

Double edit: would it make more sense to distinguish the terms as system-1-status and system-2-status?

Comment author: [deleted] 09 September 2012 02:12:33AM *  2 points [-]

I...think you're confused. I didn't say social status doesn't exist; I also didn't say that "social status" was a bad term for it. What I said was that you have an extremely nonstandard set of word associations here, such that what you mean when you're saying "social status" is...well, not intuitive from the more usual use of that word.

I'm not saying instincts for status don't exist; I'm saying that "attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status" is a baffling definition of "status" (reinforcing my point by linking to a general overview of the concept and the things the word applies to). It would be like meaning only "penguins" whenever you say "birds", and then trying to generalize that use whenever someone else talks about ornithology.

Comment author: Sarokrae 09 September 2012 05:40:54AM 3 points [-]

I think you're misinterpreting my point again, and I also think it's more of a "what do you mean by "melon"" issue (ever order a melon smoothie from a place without pictures on the menu and been surprised?) than a "penguin" issue, but the definitions themselves have been adequately dissolved in this thread so there's no point in continuing to pursue something off-topic.