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someonewrongonthenet comments on What if "status" IS a terminal value for most people? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yes, that's the point. Most humans do not care about status, they care about respect, admiration, love, etc. There are very few people on this earth whose goal is to lord it over other people.
You just scavenged an antelope carcass. You're slightly hungry, but nothing that can't be fixed by gathering a few berries. You have one of three options:
-Eat it all yourself.
-Give it to Mark, who's hungry and has three hungry kids
-Give it to Stacey, who's not in any particular need.
Option 1 - Everyone sort of dislikes you now. One of Mark's children dies of starvation. People do not share their resources with you anymore.
Option 2 - Mark is super grateful*4, and Stacey is mildly impressed by your generosity. Mark is willing to help you in the future. One of his children provides one of your children with a mate.
Option 3 - Mark really hates you now. Stacey is mildly grateful. Being smarter than you, she gives the carcass to mark, who is supergrateful*4 to her and willing to help her out in the future. One of his children provide one of her children with a mate.
That simple, obvious (to you, a human with a giant social brain) decision to give the antelope carcass to Mark creates a significant evolutionary pay-off. Evolution insures that you will do this action by programming you to get warm fuzzy hedons as a result of Mark's look of gratitude when you hand him the carcass.
Did you just gain status and possibly a hint of dominance over everyone involved? Sure. But, when I first posed the question, where you scheming about the expected payoff at the end? Probably not.
These mechanisms might have ultimately evolved because of the dominance and status effects, or because of the altruism related effects. But that doesn't mean status seeking was at the end of your utility function!
By the way, Mark was using "politics" too. Your families are linked now, to the mutual benefit of all, and he isn't indebted to you for your previous generosity anymore because your interests are now linked. But that wasn't at the end of his utility function either - he just likes you because you shared resources with him.
The key thing to recognize is that "manipulating" another person is usually not about getting the upper hand over them. It's just about maximizing your interest. Ignore the sociopathic overtones of the words used to describe the actions of selfish genes ... this thing you call "Status seeking" describes empathy and respect and everything we care about in humanity.
This is said often, but it just needs to be said again: Be careful with the amateur evolutionary psychology Just So Stories. They sound nice, but unless you are someone who deeply knows current evolutionary psychology research, you are basically making stuff up. Maybe guided making stuff up, but it is still a mistake to think that a stories like that explains much. The proof of its weakness is that it does not rule out anything much, as it is possible to invent a plausible sounding EvPsyc story to explain just about anything, true or false.
That said, in this particular case, you are not saying anything too radical, and I do not really object to the content of your post. But in general, this is a failure mode to be aware of, and to look out for and avoid doing.
You're right of course, but it couldn't be helped. The premise of the main post under discussion is "human intelligence evolved so that we could outwit one another, and therefore status seeking is a terminal value for most humans". There are so many evo-psych leaps in that sentence that I couldn't figure out how to even approach the topic without making a few leaps of my own. Maybe that was the wrong way to go about it, but I would like to think that lesswrongers implicitly understand these caveats whenever evo-psych is discussed.
Admittedly, my real justification for not believing that status seeking is a terminal value has got nothing to do with evolution. It's just that I know many people who behave in ways that would imply that status is not a high priority for them. Despite evolution not providing any positive evidence for my belief, I can see that my belief at the very least doesn't clash with my model of how evolution works, so I just put the two together to illustrate this lack-of-clashing.
I suppose that this would border on what people here term "dark arts", had I done this self consciously, since there was a discrepancy between the evidence which justified my belief and the arguments which I used to justified the claim.
The point I was trying to make (and should have stated more succinctly) is that the idea that intelligence arouse as part of runaway arms-race selection does not necessarily imply that humans must be very status seeking. Generating an alternative narrative to counter the proposed narrative was perhaps not the best method of getting that point across.