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Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

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Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#211

Post by ativzzz »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #162
ahelwer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahahahaha no absolutely not. Unless they clearly enjoy solving those types of puzzles for their own personal enjoyment, anyone chasing status through leetcode comes off as just kinda pathetic. What an incredible waste of time, like competing to get the highest score on an IQ test. Much more impressive is when people direct their intelligence toward solving problems in high-dimensional domains. Self-contained leetcode…

I think OP meant leetcode is the gatekeeper for software engineers working at a big tech corp or a smaller one where compensation and the career path can vary wildly.

Exactly what I meant

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#212

Post by ryandrake »

dfxm12 wrote: post #140
ck425 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression, and indeed my personal issue with inheritance, is financial inheritance. I have far less issues with other forms of inheritance. Sure I'm occasionally jealous of the opportunities or skills others learnt from a young age but overall I'm just glad there are more talented, thoughtful, considerate people out there. The only part that ticks me off is arrogant people who claim to have gotten far only on the…

My impression, and indeed my personal issue with inheritance, is financial inheritance. According to this study[0], at least 50% of wealth persistence is accounted for by direct transfers from parents, i.e. financial inheritance, while earnings and education are only able to explain 25%. 0 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12535

Education is often a financial inheritance in disguise. If dad pays for your K-12 private schooling and entire Harvard education, how is that practically different than a direct cash transfer?

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#213

Post by crocodiletears »

User23 wrote: post #160
gonehome wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably a lot of people are driven to be entrepreneurs because of the status. The issue with the bankers is that they’re trapped in a local maximum. A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS. I don’t buy that entrepreneurs are not interested in status, they’re just making a longer term status play (and taking on…

> A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS. Not even close. Regardless of the high esteem we may hold them in, the average person just sees them that you list as rich dorks. Compare and contrast with say Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio who, to use a stock phrase, men want to be and women want to be with.

I don't think actors and celebrities 'famous for being famous' are held in such high esteem anymore. I think that peaked in the oughties, and that the profession's renown's been in a slow decline since. This may in part be due to how replaceable and commoditized their industries have made them.

The average person may lust after famous person 'x', or be jealous of their resources. They may even follow them as a sideshow. But I've met very few people who want to be a celebrity, or admire more than one or two for their contributions to the world.

Celebrities may be able to capture our attention better, but put your average celebrity next to a reasonably successful entrepreneur, and ask the average person which is more praiseworthy, or admirable, and I think the entrepreneur will win 80% of the time (I say 80% of the time, because I'm certain a small number of high-level athletes and musicians break that rule)

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#214

Post by adwn »

pb7 wrote: post #194
nlh wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good alternative! Personally, I don't even go there. By all measures, I haven't been "employed" since the late 90s (when I was briefly an employee of an investment bank for a summer internship). I've run my own businesses, helped others build theirs, worked as a consultant, and done nothing at various times for the past 20 years. Rather than describe my state of being as "employed" vs "unemployed", I always…

What are your thoughts on simply “self-employed”?

The German word for "self-employed" is "selbstständig", which can also mean "independent". That would be the perfect word for describing nih's situation.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#215

Post by ska »

r00fus wrote: post #201
ska wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sabbatical implies you are working on something else though, so seems to me quite different than "funemployed".

Does it? I always thought of it as a burnout recovery (sometimes paid) with guaranteed reinstatement.

It does in my experience.

This may be biased by my academic background where a sabbatical year is typically one where you would have no teaching duties so were free to travel to another university to work with a new group, explore a new field, finish a manuscript, etc. Expectation is that you are working, but not your routine work.

I've heard it used similarly outside academic contexts and when it was not something you were contractually guaranteed - e.g. "I took a year off my job to finish my book" , but never in the sense of "I took a year off my job to go surfing".

So i guess I think of it as a formalized break from your work routine where you do something else productive with the expectation of going back to that work afterwards.

Of course "productive" here is a bit slippery.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#216

Post by rektide »

gonehome wrote: post #149
paulsutter wrote: post #84

Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you wont do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they've made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening. Then they sheepishly…

Arguably a lot of people are driven to be entrepreneurs because of the status. The issue with the bankers is that they’re trapped in a local maximum. A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS. I don’t buy that entrepreneurs are not interested in status, they’re just making a longer term status play (and taking on…

> I don’t buy that entrepreneurs are not interested in status, they’re just making a longer term status play (and taking on more financial risk to do so).

Trying to group all entrepreneurs together, I think, is a huge mistake.

I've definitely seen status driven entrepreneurs. Some of them are amazing.

But the ones that fill me with joy are the ones that clearly were sick of the world being incredibly bad at things, that could not accept humanity embarrassing itself so poorly, and who could not live with a planet that had so much wasted potential. And who responded. Who ventured forward, to make at least some data points, where humanity was doing it right. These people DNGAF about status, they only care about trying to generate some good, creating some value.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#217

Post by rektide »

nsxwolf wrote: post #142
paulsutter wrote: post #84

Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you wont do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they've made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening. Then they sheepishly…

I mean, as a lowly software engineer that just makes a decent income, I won't do it either, for the same reasons.

Sure would be nice to be able to pay for passable housing & health care while I'm trying to create. The burn rate is too damned high.

#vanlife is a nice escape fantasy, for this ultra-hostile expensive world we live in.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#218

Post by User23 »

lftl wrote: post #203
User23 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS. Not even close. Regardless of the high esteem we may hold them in, the average person just sees them that you list as rich dorks. Compare and contrast with say Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio who, to use a stock phrase, men want to be and women want to be with.

I think attractiveness confounds a comparison between Brad Pitt/Leonardo DiCaprio with Zuckerberg, Bezos and Gates. Is there an actor who isn't considered highly attractive that you think the average person would hold in significantly higher regard than successful tech entrepreneurs?

Jack Nicholson comes to mind. And Mick Jagger is ugly as sin and that doesn’t hurt his status.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#219

Post by bumby »

clairity wrote: post #208
bumby wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think that extreme relativistic stance waters down the idea of "social" status to be meaningless because it negates the social aspect. At that point, it's no different than saying "people chase what they value". That's trivially obvious; the chasing of social status is a subset criteria meant to say "people chase what they value, and what they value is social standing defined by their desired in-group".…

> "Using a 'singular global social order' is a bit of a straw man. It doesn't have to global, just like it can't be individual." and again, that's the point. neither extreme is realistic, but we have a bias toward one that we should actively compensate for. most of our esteem derives for the few hundred to a few thousand people that forms our social system, but our thinking tends to stray to where we stand in the wid…

Maybe, but that's not been my experience. I've found people tend to value the social standing of that "few thousand" people that make up their immediate society rather than the global collective. If anything, I've noticed a tendency to rail against the massive collective value because of it's juxtaposition to that of the value system closer to home.

As a silly example, a giant pickup is a status symbol in cattle country while a tesla is a status symbol in some parts of CA. Both sometimes look down their nose at the other. I'm not making a case as to which is correct, just that I doubt people make their value judgement in response to some global society.

Since I have little presence on social media, I may just not have a good handle on how that skews the whole dynamic but it certainly feels more locally biased to me.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#220

Post by klmadfejno »

paulsutter wrote: post #84

Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you wont do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they've made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening. Then they sheepishly…

I'm in a relatively high status career, followed that just right path, and more or less planned it all out since middle school. For what its worth, I don't give a crap about status. I think most of my peers don't either, at least relative to the past. I think materialism and arbitrary status seeking is one the decline for the young professional. High end professional fashion and fancy watches are nowhere to be seen in my office (well, pre-covid at least). Sure, there's social media doing its thing, but in the grand scheme of things it's importance to the average person's self image is small.

I do care about access to high paying wages with work that gradually grows more high level over time. I do think working at a startup could be more fun, but I don't think it'd be a good idea worth doing, ever, given what I've got now.

I am happy with what I've got. I make a chunk less than $200k, which isn't close to the very top tiers, but it's way more than I need. Yeah, probably could have gotten even more going a CS FANG route or a lucrative start up that just works. But personally I think everything more or less went as planned and I think that's great.

I wouldn't go assuming that folks in similar positions aren't aware of the calculus here either. If someone says running a startup sounds really interesting, that's because there's a lot of cool stuff in it. The same could be said of being a commercial fisherman, or being a detective, or running a small restaurant. I mean running a small restaurant sounds awesome. But it also probably sucks. If someone asks me about it, I'm likely to focus on the positives. I'm not exactly being asked to sign my name on a career form here. If you decide to call me out on not actually wanting to drop my lucrative career for that startup/restaurant/fish boat, that's not me being sheepish, that's me trying to downplay an uncomfortable situation coupled with an apparent assumption that I'm unaware of my own vanity for status :/

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