You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

handoflixue comments on What if "status" IS a terminal value for most people? - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: handoflixue 24 December 2012 08:31PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (111)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: handoflixue 26 December 2012 03:02:30AM 0 points [-]

"Ranking people by status"

My first reaction is "people DO that?"

I can evaluate status in a very crude sense, but the algorithm seems to be a combination of HasAuthority and FriendsWithAuthority. So Co-Worker A, who is friends with the CEO, can probably make higher-status requests than I can. And my boss can obviously do that. But the idea that Co-Worker A could have more status than my boss is a concept I can't evaluate; as far as I can tell it just can't be true.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 December 2012 03:58:58AM *  2 points [-]

My first reaction is "people DO that?"

I think so? I mean, if status can be high or low, that does imply a ranking. I don't know how detailed they get about it, but I think the idea is to have a hierarchy when you're finished.

can probably make higher-status requests than I can

I don't even have that. I just do whatever makes sense for the situation and then when people behave in a way that makes what I'm doing dysfunctional, I go "What the heck?" Then, I look at it in hindsight and go "Oh, yeah. Status games exist. Right."

This is probably not good, but considering my level of motivation, it's going to take a while for me to learn to think of these things in advance...

Comment author: handoflixue 26 December 2012 07:00:57PM 0 points [-]

I have an unfortunate tendency to also run head-long in to "right, the reason this isn't working is that I don't have sufficient status to make that request", and then being very puzzled. I'd been slowly mapping this out beforehand, but this revelation was apparently a useful insight in to doing a quick, fairly heavy update. Hopefully in the future I will be a lot more aware of why things are failing, even if I'm not otherwise improving :)