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Konkvistador comments on What if "status" IS a terminal value for most people? - Less Wrong
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Comments (111)
Are you certain of this? Don't get me wrong it seems possible. But that paragraph will be seen by many people as a grab for status in the LessWrong community.
Which statement in this context would one consider as evidence for not valuing status?
This statement is evidence for not valuing status. Curiously, given the way evidence works, this is entirely compatible with Konkvistador's claim and also with the interpretation he suggests many will have.
As an example consider p(has this trait) raising from 0.001 to 0.01. It would still be most likely that this was a status move but there has been an update in favor of "has this trait".
Upvote for "I did the math and your claim was correct".
Terminal vs. Instrumental valuing something is a tricky distinction to make in humans! I have to shrug and say I don't know.
Not seeming to care about status on the other hand is quite easy to detect. The argument wouldn't have shown much optimization for making the author look high status. For example an opportunity to talk about positive traits the author has may be passed up.
Also note I wasn't claiming the paragraph was evidence, just that it would be seen as a status grab. It is after all status raising if taken as an accurate description of a person in our community.
I had genuinely not considered that it would ACTUALLY raise my status to make that claim. This was originally written for a more mainstream audience, where that claim would (I presume) be low status. A friend of mine even commented in a bit of shock that this wasn't an obvious fact of the world to me.
I find it amusing that my accidental status grab has been subverted by you, and turned in to a potential loss of status :)
A confession of socially inappropriate/immoral behaviour.
Sharing something highly personal and embarassing?
Might also be considered an attempt to signal status with "Look how brave I am!". After all, that's what many think Eliezer's OkCupid profile is.
Alternate hypothesii:
1) I'm lying and this is a grab for status.
In this case, well, I'd expect a totally different internal state. If this is true, I might as well concede that I'm simply incapable of rationality when it comes to understanding myself and my own motives. Obviously you have a different perspective, so I'd mostly have to point at my comment history. If I value status, I'm certainly going for more of an "underdog" status as I routinely post anti-cryogenics and not-infrequently get nailed down to -1 or -2 for being brash, sarcastic, and generally abrasive :)
I'm not sure why I'd want to build up this sort of "underdog" status instead of writing a truly high-status post, except that it requires very little work, but then if I'm not putting work in to it, I can't value it that much can I?
2) I simply have a lower valuation of status, but it's still there. 3) I have a normal valuation of status, but other priorities override it.
These seem observationally indistinguishable, unless a loss of status is clearly painful to me, so I'm grouping them together.
Frankly, I have no clue how I'd easily distinguish this, nor prove it externally. Status IS instrumentally useful, so I'm not going to go out and sink my status just to prove a point (although I claim to have done that when status WASN'T instrumentally useful to me, and when I was young enough not to really grasp instrumental values, but you can't really confirm that...)
Alternate #1 I'd rate as < 1%. Alternate #2/3, combined, I'd rate ~20%, based on internal evidence.
So ~80% confident?
4) I value status similarly to most people, but believe otherwise because this value is implemented by areas of my mind that are opaque to me
5) I value status similarly to most people, but have acquired the alief that truth and understanding are high status and this has crowded out most of the behaviors that would normally be associated with status-optimizing.
4) Less than 1%; While internal evaluation is important, I primarily measure based on empirical behavior - I go without shaving my legs, I don't mind wearing stained clothing, I'll happily sit on wet grass... 2 or 3 seems just flat-out more plausible to me. This also fails to explain why I'm both low-status AND seem to be entirely content with that.
5) Less than 1%; I consciously believe that truth and understanding are LOW status, and I'd be rather baffled to be mistaken about that self evaluation.
Thank you though, I had not considered either :)
Do you think you would be writing using with capitalizations and conventional, non-phonetic, spelling if you were not concerned about status?
Is there a group, any group, of people whose respect and approval you do appreciate? Truth and understanding are high status here...
Be careful. Lost purposes like following an arbitrary rule set because it is the one you where taught first would happen even to status blind people.
izit relli eezier too rite like thiz than to follow the standard? Following the rules facilitates communication, their violation is disctracting. Not caring about status doesn't entail not caring about people repeatedly complaining about one's spelling instead of replying to the topic.
If I was going to do that, status considerations would hit before communication concerns would. And I wanted to see if I could elicit that same response.
EDITED
If you could WHAT?
That depends on situation and is besides the point anyway - even if there were no status considerations (think of a lolcat forum or something), I wouldn't do that (because it isn't easier). Would you?
Well, I notice strong fears of being judged (and other emotions that I have determined to be from status concern) surrounding the correct use of grammar and such, so I thought there was a chance that other people would share it. That seems like a point.
I was also thinking that if I were actually not concerned about status I probably would have stopped capitalizing things at all and I would have considered making other changes. That probably isn't true, though, because the instrumental value of grammar is still really high if it's a status concern for other people.
I would.
I refused to use anything but capital letters in my hand writing until I took calculus because I saw no functional difference between A and a as far as writing was concerned and A was easier to write.
In hind sight that seems like it would be evidence of low status valueing.
no but it is easier to type like this, no?
I agree with your point about ease of communication, though.
I never write/type without capitalisation even in private communication where the interlocutor does and thus my disorthography would cost me nothing in terms of status. Pressing shift once in a while isn't noticeably inconvenient to me and writing the standard way is simply a habit.
There are Communities where this is high status behavior. But i presume you would have considered this if you were to belong to such a community.
Typo?
She already admitted that status is useful, so this post could be both a grab for status and a genuine confession :P
She is actually a girl, but common mistake :)
This actually seems potentially relevant--I think men and women may value status differently.
Could it be that men and women just gain and lose status for different kinds of actions? Alternatively what we call status is altogether composed of different things in men and women.
In fairness, I like games that are about defeating opponents and advancing levels. My recent interests have included Diablo III, Guild Wars 2, and Mass Effect. I'm also polyamorous.
On the other hand, I haven't founded any companies and I'm usually comfortable asking for directions.
Edited. I'm from a country of gender neutral pronouns :/
It doesn't bother me :)