I suppose it would be futile to attempt to convince you to use singular 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun that wouldn't completely derail my train of thought from the actual (interesting) subject matter when encountered two-thirds into the article?
I agree: LW already has a problem because is uses too much idiosyncratic terminology. Please don't make the problem worse: many people reading "ze" in an article will just think you're batshit crazy.
"Ve" was supposed to be for actual gender-neutral entities, transhuman or otherwise. In any case I gave up and started using "they" or "it".
Here's a piece that I think you're missing: identity and status are related, but not equivalent.
Identity is about living up to a social standard or ideal for a role that defines your place in the tribe. Living up to "your" ideals (i.e., the tribe's standard for the role) produces good feelings.
Let's say that a tribe has hunters, gatherers, warriors, shamans, and healers. Each subgroup (subculture?) has a set of practices, sayings, beliefs, values, etc. that are unique to that subgroup role. In order for an individual to occupy a productive specialization, they have to learn (and be motivated to embody) these standards and practices.
Also notice that what's high-status behavior for each subgroup is different; behavior that's honored when done by a shaman would be laughed at (or worse) in a hunter.
Thus, we get the all-too-human phenomena of conforming non-conformists, status-seeking behavior by people who claim that all status is beneath them, etc.
So, I think you're on the right general track, but missing a more specific mechanism that more closely explains why this type of behavior is rewarded. It's not status-seeking per se, it's "living up to ideals". Consp...
Either "identity" is too vague or I don't understand how you're using it. There's no explanation of what an identity is, why or how people seek an identity, or why they would seek one instead of others. "Village idiot" is an identity and "brilliant seeker of truth" is an identity, but most people, given the choice, would try to conform to the latter.
"Living up to ideals" is a very human-level thought. Where's the mental circuitry behind it? Why would people want to live up to ideals, or even have ideals? What's my motivation?
I think you're entirely right about identity, but that identity is a high-level process that emerges out of the search for status. Exactly how is a whole other post, but I think a lot of the research you mention is in the fields of contingencies of self-worth, ie how our self-esteem comes from lots of different sources. We then value or devalue those sources in order to maximize our own self-esteem. I'm pretty smart but not too strong, so I come up with a worldview in which intellect is much more important than physical strength, and my identities, like "rationalist" and "leftist with a side of libertariani...
This is an excellent post. You miss a significant upside to this delusion in general: status is zero-sum, so divergent status creates new winners. In a large society, you need divergent status mechanisms because there's only so much status to go around if everyone totally agrees on the rules. By splitting into subgroups, it's possible to have many more high-status folk. Indeed, I'd expect a moderately advanced AI-genie to design a utopia fragmented enough that most people can be at least somewhat high status.
Your story makes sense, but you are missing the strong human urge to split into tribes. We want to show our people we are committed especially to them, and we can do that by putting effort into symbols of status that work much better for them than for other groups. Investing in generic status symbols does not signal loyalty to one's group.
An example of status wire-heading-- Razib discovers that incoherent moralistic ranting feels really good.
Regarding the second half, We did some experiments with cold water in ears in SIAI house last Summer. Discovered a) that there was a much simpler explanation than the apologist and the revolutionary for the phenomenon discussed in that post, and b) that we should do more experiments/be more empirical, as they really do yield info out of proportion to the time required to do them if you don't feel obliged to write them up as papers and go through the rituals of modern science.
...that there was a much simpler explanation than the apologist and the revolutionary for the phenomenon discussed in that post...
You can't just say there's a simpler explanation and then not give it!
...Well, you can, but it's rather cruel.
The cold water interferes with proprioception. You cease to directly perceive the arm through that modality and its apparent relationship to you so you are more receptive to other information which contradicts the hypothesis that it isn't paralyzed. When you can trivially directly feel that you can move your arm and that it is doing what you want it to, if you aren't very materialistic you don't question why you want your arm to stay still when you have incentives to move it.
Eliezer has said that "it seems pretty obvious to me that some point in the not-too-distant future we're going to build an AI [...] it will be a superintelligence relative to us [...] in one to ten decades and probably on the lower side of that." ---- http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21857
The vast majority of very smart and accomplished people (e.g. Nobel prize winners in sciences, Fields medalists, founders of large tech corporations) do not subscribe to the view that the "singularity is near." This raises a strong possibility that peo...
Most unpopular beliefs are false. However, if everyone subscribed to strict majoritarianism and never took up unpopular beliefs, intellectual progress would cease completely. There must come a point at which cost we pay in wasted effort because of false unpopular beliefs is worth the payoff in progress through new ideas, which of course all start off unpopular. So while I'd like 9-11 truthers to see the error of their beliefs, I'd like to achieve that through argument based on fact, rather than through simply pointing out that everyone disagrees with them.
Also, of course, strict majoritarianism is self-defeating, since it's a pretty unpopular stance in itself.
Variations on this theme have certainly come up. This site says it's about rationality, yet the local consensus is weird or deviant, what if that's being produced by the very same irrationality mechanisms that you all write about? Lots of people have posed that question.
With respect to your comparison: The idea that this will be the century of artificial intelligence is commonplace now. Silicon Valley has not quite become Singularity Valley, but it is extremely common for people who work in the computer industry, even very senior ones, to now anticipate a future that is radically science-fictional in character. It would only be a small number of your "very smart and accomplished people" who even have a considered opinion, pro or con, on Eliezer's specific philosophy, but I don't think his statement that you quote is especially unusual or anomalous for its time.
You could say something similar about the 9-11 Truthers too - that they are part of the zeitgeist - though in locating their social support base, you'll find it's identifiably different to the culture in which singularity ideas are most potent. The generalization is far from universal, but I would say that singularity believers tend to be people from technical or scientific subcultures who feel personally empowered by the rise of technology, whereas 9-11 conspiracy believers are politically and socially minded and feel disempowered by the state of the world.
schizophrenics and other people who lose touch with reality sometimes suffer so-called delusions of grandeur.
If I start to suffer delusions of grandeur I hope I retain the ability to go meta by having my delusions of grandeur be about how grand and delusional my delusions of grandeur are. If I start to hear voices I hope the voices talk about how they're hearing voices too---either mine, their own, or some other entities'.
I would think that status motivations are only a minor element in what makes a person a Truther. It has far more to do with purely cognitive factors, such as a prior conception of the world as being governed by a clique of sociopathic criminal masterminds.
To what extent has there been a discussion on the effect of gender on the prevalence and importance of status-seeking behavior? If it hasn't been discussed, may I suggest this thread to begin one?
I would probably have nothing to contribute, since I find the literature difficult to sift through, but it strikes me that much of what I'm reading (tendency to be over-confident, status as a primary motivation, etc.) would apply asymmetrically more to men than women.
(For example, in response to pjeby's comment distinguishing identity and status, I think I recall...
I haven't read any literature on this issue specifically, but I suggest that most such literature would have a high tendency to be biased by societal pressures.
My experience is that women in certain kinds of overtly female-centric social situations (e.g. feminism communities, fat acceptance communities, some subsections of the disability community) are just as concerned with status as men are in normal circumstances. Women in mixed-gender social situations seem to tend to automatically assume that they're considered outsiders, and react to that by defending each other and deferring to authority. They also seem to assume that attempting to gain status in such situations is futile, or can only be achieved by playing to the stereotypes of how women are supposed to behave, depending on the situation. (These assumptions may, in fact, be correct in most situations.) That assumption of outsider-ness seems to me like it would also manifest as a heightened awareness of identity, as identity is an important part of the situation at hand.
Speaking of self-esteem, check out Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart and Joseph M. Boden's "Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem".
Bryan Caplan uses the fact that people rarely have delusions of mediocrity or obscurity to argue for a Szaszian conception of mental illness.
When we say that humans are evoled to seek status we are saying that they are evolved to seek status in a small tribe. From a evolutionary perspective the amount of recognition of the 100 closed human beings is more important thann the amount of recognition by the billions of people who life on this earth.
What about expectations? A lot of "outsider" groups and movements assert that Come The Revolution. their superior wisdom/intellect/knowledge will be recognized and they will then have great wealth/status/power.
It's worked sometimes. And those who "get in on the ground floor" sometimes benefit extravagantly.
In this model, people aren't just seeking status, they're (also? instead?) seeking a state of affairs that allows them to believe they have status.
It seems like most situations that this theory covers are already explained by either: (a) people seek status not only in the context of society at large but also in the context of small groups (b) for the cases where no one else knows, ego -- people seek to feel good about themselves (including that they are smart)
Perhaps the (b) cases are explained better by the "seeking plausible belief in own status" model, but I'm not sure that that's clear, at least from what's been written so far.
Parts of this post that deal with positive illusions could apply to any goal that people have, not just the goal to seek status. A classic social psychology article on that topic is Ziva Kunda's The Case for Motivated Reasoning (pdf). Several aspects of this post are present in her (zir?) paper, including:
Well put! To add some anecdotal evidence to your model, an older psychiatrist friend of mine described an increasing prevalence of the delusion that a person was the only real thing in the world, and everything else was either an illusion like the matrix or that everyone else was a type of p-zombie. I suggested that the movie The Matrix might be the source of these delusions, but he said the delusion seemed to be gaining in popularity even now, much after the movie's release. I guess the idea is just generally floating around our culture, and it appeal...
I beg to differ about the Time Cube Guy (Pardon the lack of a link... You all know where to find him), but he does have followers now who hope to gain credibility with him. On the Richard Dawkins site in the last two years, there have been three others who have been promoting his "theory"...
Otherwise... I get the point of the post... (And I see from the comments below that I was not the only one to wonder about or question the use of ze - it took me a few moments to get that it was a genderless pronoun.
Regarding the first half of this post, I have been waiting a long time for someone to make the point that people aren't usually trying to climb a status ladder. Good arguments. I don't think that people always need to claim that their sort of person is "great" though in order to feel good about themselves. They only need to feel that they are a good exemplar of their sort of person and that their sort of person isn't too despised and isn't loosing status.
Yvain, this is an interesting model, but, as you mention yourself, maybe it explains a bit too much. Do you have some testable prediction based on this?
One difficulty may be to distinguish (1) seeking status and (2) seeking a state of affairs that allows you to believe you have status... These two things have substantial overlap, which makes it hard to study them independently. They are not the same though; a good example of something that is only (2) but not (1) would help.
and wouldn't get away with me get away with it?
I suspect that this is supposed to be "and wouldn't let me get away with it?"
Nice post, thanks.
"In this model, people aren't just seeking status, they're (also? instead?) seeking a state of affairs that allows them to believe they have status."
Replace also or instead with rather. That is, the default state of mind is that individuals believe they have status. This might be through the regular strategy of seeking social wealth (icons, respect, position, possessions), as well as through invisibles (A Big Idea, the truth, The Secret). The status is always self-assigned; think of those who do do not accept the status confer
Mother Teresa had lots of status as a consequence of successful and effective self-promotion, which is precisely why she came to mind as an example of a non-status seeking person rather than failing to come to mind becaus you had never heard of her.
"A rat isn't exactly seeking an optimum level of food, it's seeking an optimum ratio of ventromedial to ventrolateral hypothalamic stimulation, or, in rat terms, a nice, well-fed feeling."
So if I move my hand away from a hot pan, am I actually seeking to: "move my hand away from a hot pan" or
"avoid touching the pan" or
"avoid being burnt" or
"avoid pain receptors in my hand being activated" or
"avoid neural signals in my brain that correspond to pain" or
"avoid the feeling of pain"?
Someon...
"Human nature 101. Once they've staked their identity on being part of the defiant elect who know the Hidden Truth, there's no way it'll occur to them that they're our catspaws." - Mysterious Conspirator A
This sentence sums up a very large category of human experience and motivation. Informally we talk about this all the time; formally it usually gets ignored in favor of a simple ladder model of status.
In the ladder model, status is a one-dimensional line from low to high. Every person occupies a certain rung on the ladder determined by other people's respect. When people take status-seeking actions, their goal is to to change other people's opinions of themselves and move up the ladder.
But many, maybe most human actions are counterproductive at moving up the status ladder. 9-11 Conspiracy Theories are a case in point. They're a quick and easy way to have most of society think you're stupid and crazy. So is serious interest in the paranormal or any extremist political or religious belief. So why do these stay popular?
Could these just be the conclusions reached by honest (but presumably mistaken) truth-seekers unmotivated by status? It's possible, but many people not only hold these beliefs, but flaunt them out of proportion to any good they could do. And there are also cases of people pursuing low-status roles where there is no "fact of the matter". People take great efforts to identify themselves as Goths or Juggalos or whatever even when it's a quick status hit.
Classically people in these subcultures are low status in normal society. Since subcultures are smaller and use different criteria for high status, maybe they just want to be a big fish in a small pond, or rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven, or be first in a village instead of second in Rome. The sheer number of idioms for the idea in the English language suggests that somebody somewhere must have thought along those lines.
But sometimes it's a subculture of one. That Time Cube guy, for example. He's not in it to gain cred with all the other Time Cube guys. And there are 9-11 Truthers who don't know any other Truthers in real life and may not even correspond with others online besides reading a few websites.
Which brings us back to Eliezer's explanation: the Truthers have "staked their identity on being part of the defiant elect who know the Hidden Truth". But what does that mean?
A biologist can make a rat feel full by stimulating its ventromedial hypothalamus. Such a rat will have no interest in food even if it hasn't eaten for days and its organs are all wasting away from starvation. But stimulate the ventrolateral hypothalamus, and the rat will feel famished and eat everything in sight, even if it's full to bursting. A rat isn't exactly seeking an optimum level of food, it's seeking an optimum ratio of ventromedial to ventrolateral hypothalamic stimulation, or, in rat terms, a nice, well-fed feeling.
And humans aren't seeking status per se, we're seeking a certain pattern of brain activation that corresponds to a self-assessment of having high status (possibly increased levels of dopamine in the limbic system). In human terms, this is something like self-esteem. This equation of self esteem with internal measurement of social status is a summary of sociometer theory.
So already, we see a way in which overestimating status might be a very primitive form of wireheading. Having high status makes you feel good. Not having high status, but thinking you do, also makes you feel good. One would expect evolution to put a brake on this sort of behavior, and it does, but there may be an evolutionary incentive not to arrest it completely.
If self esteem is really a measuring tool, it is a biased one. Ability to convince others you are high status gains you a selective advantage, and the easiest way to convince others of something is to believe it yourself. So there is pressure to adjust the sociometer a bit upward.
So a person trying to estimate zir social status must balance two conflicting goals. First, ze must try to get as accurate an assessment of status as possible in order to plan a social life and predict others' reactions. Second, ze must construct a narrative that allows them to present zir social status as as high as possible, in order to reap the benefits of appearing high status.
The corresponding mind model1 looks a lot like an apologist and a revolutionary2: one drive working to convince you you're great (and fitting all data to that theory), and another acting as a brake and making sure you don't depart so far from reality that people start laughing.
In this model, people aren't just seeking status, they're (also? instead?) seeking a state of affairs that allows them to believe they have status. Genuinely having high status lets them assign themselves high status, but so do lots of other things. Being a 9-11 Truther works for exactly the reason mentioned in the original quote: they've figured out a deep and important secret that the rest of the world is too complacent to realize.
It explains a lot. Maybe too much. A model that can explain anything explains nothing. I'm not a 9-11 Truther. Why not? Because my reality-brake is too strong, and it wouldn't let me get away with it? Because I compensate by gaining status from telling myself how smart I am for not being a gullible fool like those Truthers are? Both explanations accord with my introspective experience, but at this level they do permit a certain level of mixing and matching that could explain any person holding or not holding any opinion.
In future posts in this sequence, I'll try to present some more specifics, especially with regard to the behavior of contrarians.
Footnotes
1. I wrote this before reading Wei Dai's interesting post on the master-slave model, but it seems to have implications for this sort of question.
2. One point that weakly supports this model: schizophrenics and other people who lose touch with reality sometimes suffer so-called delusions of grandeur. When the mind becomes detached from reality (loses its 'brake'), it is free to assign itself as high a status as it can imagine, and ends up assuming it's Napoleon or Jesus or something like that.