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Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I recently re-read some old Less Wrong posts on status. It struck me that none of them really capture what I mean by the word.
I have been wondering if it makes sense to operationalize status as a measure of the extent to which other individuals have a rational self-interest in cooperating with you. Specifically, if you want to know the status of an individual, you estimate the probability that an arbitrarily chosen member of the group will get higher utility from cooperating than defecting in a two-player game.
I have been thinking about writing a full post on this. Before I start writing, does anyone have any thoughts on whether this definition has been proposed before, and on whether it captures your intuition behind what “status” is? Or any ideas about which aspects of this definition you would like to see discussed in a write-up?
Status is social.
There are things you prefer. Positive things like "I like ice cream" and negative things like "I hope that strong guy will not kill me". This is the individual level.
But there are social aspects, such as "people like this thing, so even if I personally do not like it, it is useful to trade", or "people are afraid of this guy, so even if I personally do not care about him, if I make him angry, I will make a lot of additional enemies". When people perceive each others' perceptions, on a social level the perceptions become 1-place words: "this is nice" (they say, although I personally do not like it), "this is respected" (generally, although I personally do not respect it), etc.
But even this was just an explanation on a game-theoretical level. This is how a paperclip maximizer trying to trade with humans would perceive the situation. "I will collect these golden coins, althouth they are meaningless, because I can trade them with humans for paperclip-making tools. I will respect human gods, because otherwise humans will get angry and will destroy many paperclips to punish me." As a social species we have instincts for this. We feel the status (that is: our heuristics evaluate it quickly and provide us the result). For some people this instinct works better, for other people it works worse. In some situations, the heuristics fail.