We moderns are status-drunk
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
This is false thru history. A noble man could be higher status than a rich merchant, to not talk about race.
The article gets what could be some reasonable conclusion from wrong data. It seems that the author started from an opinion, and then build a case around it.
> low level workers are often well advised to “keep *their* head down”, and just do their job.
> *we* all tend to rise in status when we seem to influence the behavior of others, but fall when lower status others seem to influence us.
Also, from the article I have an strong feeling that the author thinks of himself as high-status.
There are plenty of reasons to see our "status" as closer to peers of Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster than serfs deserving only to serve them (not least Jeff and the Duke probably seeing it that way too!) and I'm not sure the size of the economic gap corrects that perception, which is based mostly on other measures of self worth
It is Robin Hanson, so... yeah, that's exactly the thought process.
But like machine learning, we can never know why life “chose” one way over the other. Still, that any trait in us or other species, psychology or other, is selected by evolution must be true, as any trait selected away by evolution by definition does not live. The alternative explanation of our psychology would require a supernatural spiritual force, which is even harder to falsify with experiment than evolutionary psychology.
So to questions of “why” natural selection chose us who live now to have the psychology we have, can never be answered by experiment.
When we can’t find knowledge through experiment, wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method - leaving us with the flawed but but interesting subject of the evolution of our psychology
I would agree, if I saw anyone actually doing this. But every single time I see someone using evolutionary psychology to explain something they already believe in.
It might be interesting to start with a blank slate, no assumptions, and work from there to see what sort of psychology you end up with. But that would be a bit like predicting evolution: if you started out with some amino acids the odds of getting to Elvis are ridiculously small. There's no guarantee that if we started with a blank slate we'd end up where we are. There's too many other possibilities, the process is chaotic.
Obviously our psychology evolved. But that provides a mechanism, not an explanation. Just like "why are our eyeballs the wrong way around?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". "why is social media so bad for us?" has no answer except "because we evolved that way". You can't explain why our eyeballs are the wrong way around, because there were no "reasons" for that. It wasn't a choice that anyone made logically. Trying to provide reasons for it misses the point of evolution completely. Same for our psychology. Trying to reason about it misses the point. It is the way it is because that's a local optimum in the solution space of human-shaped brains.
This is a false dichotomy. Some traits do not provide enough of an advantage or a drawback to be selected for or against. Some traits reach fixation by piggy-backing on an other advantageous trait (either because they are a byproduct or just because the advantageous trait first appeared in a small insular population that shared that neutral trait.) Some reached fixation because, by chance, they got through an evolutionary bottleneck.
For example, he's right that higher status individuals experience less stress. In chimpanzees, lower status animals have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. They are more often attacked by higher status individuals and need to remain on guard. Lower status chimps are attacked more often by higher status chimps because their hierarchy is party based on physical power (agonic) and partly based on their ability contribute (hedonic).
Chimps don't go to work. They don't marry. They don't have mortgages. They don't have churches, or governments, or human rights, or school, or police forces. Chimps don't find themselves awake at 4am worrying about whether they can make next month's rent because a freelance client just dropped them.
I can perfectly well believe that lower-status chimps have more stress because they are attacked by higher-status chimps. But in my experience, the person most likely to attack me is not a successful startup entrepreneur, it's some drunk dude at 2am who didn't manage to pull.
I've been stressed and not stressed at different times in my life. Being CEO was pretty stressful. Being really poor was really stressful. Being comfortably employed and owning a house was probably the least stressful. There's not even any correlation with my status, let alone causation.
Why do we think that chimpanzee psychology has anything to do with human psychology? Do we have any evidence to support that? Saying that "we can prove evolutionary psychology conjectures about complex human behaviours because we can observe simple behaviour in chimps" is circular reasoning. The only thing we have in common with chimps is a relatively recent common evolutionary ancestor.
Animal psychology is a proxy for human psychology just as animal biology is a proxy for human biology, which is why we first test human medicine in mice. There are obvious cognitive similarities between domesticated dogs and wolves in the wild even though there are obvious differences. We can study one to learn about the other.
Agreed that being a CEO is probably a high stress job. But I think you nailed it when you said that being poor is really stressful. Saying that lower status individuals experience more stress doesn't mean that some very high status people don't experience more stress. If you're a world-famous rock star or athlete, I'm sure you experience a tremendous amount of stress. But on average, the lower your status, the more powerless you feel, the more stress you experience. You have less control over your life. But I might be wrong. Maybe it's different in humans. If you're not convinced by ethological studies, one could study cortisol levels in human beings and gauge relative status to see if stress correlates. My point being: there are ways to prove evolutionary psychology hypothesis.
This is a known problem in Psychology as a field, I gather. Because of the ready availability of psychology students, the field tends to study the psychology of western educated affluent 20-somethings. The arrogance of then saying "everyone is like this" is typical ;)
It's not rigorous enough to be useful, but then again, psychology almost never is.
No, but there's more to thinking and understanding the world than proving...
They claim the counts signal value. Obviously not.
These days you can be a domain expert but no one will take your view seriously unless some buffoon on social media who has accumulated enough Likes validates what you are saying. In the past it had to be a King or Pope (ie someone with wealth and power).
So naturally the chimp troupe craves status. You can't get anything done with out it.
If anything, people are naturally suspicious of "old money" and other types of get-rich-with-little-effort situations (e.g. usury) and people with old money continuously have to invent new reasons to justify their wealth, not uncommonly resorting to violence to keep a stake in their claim.
(This is an amalgamation of different sub-messages of Drive, Debt, The Elephant in the Brain, Savage Money, and quite probably other sources I've forgotten about, but could look up if you've read the above and want more.)
The first is by Pink?
Edit: harder to find than I thought: https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Money-Studies-Anthropology-His...
There comes in play the prosthetic status through indirect signals and symbols, from the feathers on a tribe leader’s hat to follower counts on social media. Unfortunately since status is also a comparative good (it matters having more status than the other) the virtual competition space for prosthetic status is made infinitely stretchable and manipulable for the latter.
Status isn't symmetric: a local Lord can be a high status person in the eyes of more than Dunbar's number of peasants, because he doesn't need to care much about their status (he has advisors on payroll for that.) Obviously, he's in all their Dunbar-sized circles.
In the case of a lord, the carrier of status is actually the title than the person who happens to be the lord at that time. Lordship is the technology that attempts to scale the status across time and across a higher number of people. The problem of giving what is ultimately dead-matter so much power is that anyone who can capture it can also use it, regardless of legitimacy. This is a perennial problem woven into literature and philosophy for centuries.
The high-follower-count as a status technology is just a newer, planet scale version of this game, but it is not the ultimate status carrier either. The ultimate status is held by the tech company that can give the follower count its meaning. It is the immediate entity that can convince us to divorce status from its original, participatory meaning and to respond to its reduced form that is the number. It is the almost transparent medium where numbers and attention flow through, all of which it can ultimately can turn into money.
High status != high maintenance neither high visibility.
Edit to add: this is exactly the mistake that tabloids & people magazine do, and that social networks reproduce in the mind of people. Actual status, in the mid/long term relates to what you do/contribute for yourself or to society, not what you look like/say/think. In that regard fame != status.
For anything that goes to the headlines, there is considerably much more that happens under the radar, not necessarily because it does not know how to advertise itself, but because it does not want to advertise itself as that would be a distraction.
This is the same disconnect which, in France at least, makes no distinction between nobility, bourgeoisie and wealth, when those 3 concepts have evolved and are only overlapping in specific cases.
Are they? Can you give some examples? I thought the people you were talking about came from well-off upper-middle class families who never really had to struggle and have probably been similarly well-off for a few generations, but not 'old money' (which to me at least has aristocratic implications).
Does data support modern humans having lower stress levels than similar mammals? (Or, for that matter, that higher-status mammals have lower stress?)
How would the proposed adaptation not be equally beneficial to lower-status mammals?
The strongest argument for this hypothesis seems to be its explanatory power; it smells like grasping at straws
From the article: "In most societies, investments in fertility take time and time and energy away from investments in status. Yes fertility confers some status, but in our world not as much. As people get rich, they are tempted to invest less in immediate fertility in order to gain in status"
Maybe, but fertility has declined in developed countries for poor people as well as rich people.
The article suffers from having one good idea and then trying to bash too much to fit it.
It also explains why why follower-chasing and like-farming on social media are a thing. And why too much is never enough. It's literally a game that can't be won, so millionaires try to become billionaires, and billionaires try to become trillionaires, and so on to infinity.
But this would be so much more credible with some solid supporting research instead of unsupported opinion.
I gave my car to my granddaughter a few years ago and decided to not replace it (I live in a small town and like to walk, I can borrow my wife’s car or ask friends to drive places). I often joke to people that I am poor and can’t afford a car. Recently an old friend got upset at this - she started lecturing me on how important maintaining status is.
The reason social media like Facebook is so harmful is that it enables people to paint pictures of their wonderful lives to impress other people rather than simply quietly living wonderful lives. One of the most freeing things in life is realizing that personally that we are not special, that we rely on other people. We don’t have to be great at what we do, just being kind to ourselves and other people is all we need for a happy life.
Then fails to operationalize it. What's absolute wealth? Does someone in Venezuela think his status is high because his income is 400k/month?
And the writer also fails to explain how our wealth perception would actually work or how evolution would cause it.
I'm not sure why we need this 'status theory' to tie together the trends of modern history that he describes ("rising lifespans, lower fertility, falling violence, more school, more effort into art/travel/invention/etc"), when each of them seems much more directly related to the overarching trend of "we have more (food, economic, time, technological) surplus than ancients did". Briefly:
Rising lifespans - we have vaccines, infinite and fortified food, a safer environment,...
Lower fertility - people (particularly women) have other options, childhood mortality is lower because of the prior item, contraception exists,...
Falling violence - people living closer to subsistence have less to lose from violence than those whose survival is otherwise assured; when sufficient means of survival exist there is no need to kill each other over them; we have enough resources now to spend on policing and deterring violence;...
More school and more effort spent on art etc - obviously a society of subsistence farmers will spend less on art and invention than one where a single farmer can feed a thousand people. The modern surplus is what makes this investment even possible
I know that he gives lip service against some of these counterarguments (e.g., re life expectancy "these factors do a poor job of explaining the magnitude and steadiness of the mortality fall over the last few centuries"), but I need more evidence than that to reject the simple explanation in favor of the speculative hypothesis presented here.
He also subtly confuses status _obsession_ with an erroneous _perception_ of high status. If people believe they are already high-status, why would it make sense to devote more resources to getting and achieving status instead of e.g. fertility? I believe that status-obsession certainly drives many parts of our collective behavior, but that seems entirely noncontroversial and separable from Hanson's "miscallibration from absolute wealth" hypothesis.
In sum, I was disappointed by this post and am moderately revising down my expectations from Robin Hanson going forward.
With respect to obsession vs perception, he's saying that it only makes sense to pursue more status if you are already high status. Greater status is not attainable for most. If you mistakingly think you are high status, you will accomplish little except wasting your time. Case in point: useless advanced degrees.
He’s got a write up in there about status, and how before they “figured it out,“ the actors couldn’t make believable scenes of “everyday conversation”. Then, after some play or another he hits on the idea of everybody trying to make their status just a little above or below the other person’s status in conversation.
Suddenly the acted conversations became “authentic”.
This post seems to be a similar take at a different scale and perspective. Interesting stuff.
The video has a couple of gems, such as the comparisson between an english country-side vicar, and an american TV preacher.
to be sure its not likely to have an easier time proving things compared to any other social science but going back to the raw material and piecing together more informed hypotheses, hopefully less ideologically biased, should be a good thing
https://go.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations/episode/best-...
I think my lifestyle is closer to that era, I can forage 100% of my daily diet these days (figs!, but other months it can be persimons, clementines/mandarines, peaches, ..). I feel more or less disconnected to the "modern" society conventions