jooyous comments on Solved Problems Repository - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Qiaochu_Yuan 27 March 2013 04:51AM

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Comment author: jooyous 27 March 2013 11:05:55PM 6 points [-]

Ohh. "Hey friend, do you feel insecure around me because I'm more successful than you?" type questions?

Comment author: RomeoStevens 28 March 2013 01:09:43AM 1 point [-]

exactly.

Comment author: jooyous 28 March 2013 01:24:17AM *  3 points [-]

That's a good point; I guess those are hard to ask directly. Though maybe you can still ask a variant of it if you're careful and kick into their abstract reasoning? Maybe something like "Oh my gosh, friend, I feel so insecure around person because they're more successful than me! Does that ever happen to you successful people?" Of course, they might answer the way they wish they could answer and keep acting weird around you anyway.

Though, I feel like that's a question you half-know the answer to before you ask. Are there situations where knowing the answer to a status-related question is important for making a decision and guessing wrong has a high penalty?

Comment author: RomeoStevens 28 March 2013 01:43:49AM 1 point [-]

uh...every situation?

Comment author: jooyous 28 March 2013 01:49:26AM 1 point [-]

Sounds like you worry a lot more about status than I do. o_O

Comment author: Nisan 28 March 2013 06:23:08AM 6 points [-]

That's a high-status thing to say :)

Comment author: jooyous 28 March 2013 07:13:27PM 2 points [-]

I probably hang out with mostly similar-status people, but there's got to be a lot of context I'm missing, because I can think of a number of decision questions that don't depend on the answer to "well, is this person I'm with higher status than me?"

Comment author: Nisan 28 March 2013 07:52:29PM 2 points [-]

I just said it because it was funny.

Comment author: jooyous 28 March 2013 08:45:15PM 1 point [-]

I think I am bad at knowing which comment to reply to. ^_^

Comment author: wedrifid 28 March 2013 06:47:58AM 0 points [-]

That's a high-status thing to say :)

To the point of being banal and transparent.

Comment author: Elithrion 28 March 2013 08:12:12PM 2 points [-]

I think it depends on the reading. If you read it in a sort of snooty dismissive voice, yes, certainly. But if you read it in a genuinely perplexed kind of voice, it mostly sounds confused.

Comment author: jooyous 29 March 2013 12:59:05AM 2 points [-]

That's why I put the confused-face!

I was pretty confused by "every situation" because I can definitely think of some situations where status considerations factor only negligibly into your decision process. For example: you are out with some people and notice your shoe is untied. Do you tie it? Uhh. Does it really matter if your friends are higher or lower status? Maybe if they can't afford shoes or something, but otherwise, not really. I think?

Comment author: Kindly 29 March 2013 01:58:43PM 2 points [-]

It seems like by "status" you mean status within society at large, mainly economic status, while I think most people here are thinking about status within your own social group.

So if you stop to tie your shoe and you have high status within your social group, your friends will stop and wait for you; if you have low status, they won't. (You display your assessment of your own status by asking "Hey, wait up, I have to tie my shoe" or by not asking.) There are finer gradations depending on how quickly you tie your shoe: you might hurry to avoid slowing down your friends, which I'm sure has various implications.

I'm not saying you should care about any of this; but it certainly could be an issue. If it's not an issue, that could mean one of two things: either you're so high-status you don't even notice these things, or you're not in high school any more :)

Comment author: [deleted] 28 March 2013 11:49:47PM 1 point [-]

My guess: you don't live in a very large city, so most of the people you interact with already know well (cf this), whereas that doesn't apply to RomeoStevens; and/or you are in the hard sciences or similar and he is in the humanities or similar (cf this).

Comment author: bbleeker 29 March 2013 10:57:26AM 0 points [-]

Sounds like he's male. A while ago, I read something in a thread on reddit about women in IT, where a woman complained about women having to prove themselves all the time there. And I was thinking that yes, that sucks; you'd think that after a time, people would recognize that hey, this woman knows her stuff. But then a man asked what was the problem with that, after all, it wasn't like men didn't have to prove themselves with every interaction as well.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 29 March 2013 11:39:02AM 4 points [-]

There might be a difference in the baselines that men and women have to prove themselves against.

Comment author: bbleeker 29 March 2013 03:27:14PM 0 points [-]

Yes, good point.