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We moderns are status-drunk

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Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#21

Post by notahacker »

ElViajero wrote: post #13

> evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status 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…

A more fundamental criticism is that "status" itself is a subjective, cultural and temporally unstable concept so I don't see how humanity can collectively "overestimate" our status simply because it doesn't accord with a particular economic measure of it. (It may be related to the old observation that the American poor see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", but it's a massively overstated, stretchy version of that idea)

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

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#22

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

It's an interesting idea. Reducing behaviour to a compulsive, hardwired, and irrational status instinct bypasses the nonsense about supposedly rational actors and such in economics.

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.

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#23

Post by bidirectional »

onion2k wrote: post #11
lmm wrote: post #6

The idea that higher-status people would be more status-chasing seems dubious. In the evolutionary environment there would have been diminishing returns to status, and in any environment social climbers are noticeably lower status than those with real "old money" status.

The children of "old money" families are exactly the ones who are "Instagram famous" or "TikTok stars" on social media, or funding their own startups, or working in 'elite' art galleries and auction houses for low wages, or doing a long series of unpaid internships are top companies. Those things are often status seeking activities. Being born in to a high-status family drives you to maintain that status, and often g…

> The children of "old money" families are exactly the ones who are "Instagram famous" or "TikTok stars" on social media,

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).

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#24

Post by marcus_holmes »

Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#25

Post by Juliate »

jw02 wrote: post #5

Its why every social network/content generation/attention capture architecture such as FB, HN, YouTube, Twitter et al cant function without a Like/Click/View/Upvote count publicly visible signaling status. 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…

And, you also get complete clowns that accumulate visibility and social-media-status-points thanks to the understanding of the manipulation tools offered to them but are actually incompetent to the verge of dangerous and in the worst case can become geopolitical issues.

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#26

Post by advael »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #24

Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.

I came here to say roughly this, so thank you for saving me the trouble

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#27

Post by 11235813213455 »

> During the forager era

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

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#28

Post by jeofken »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #24

Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.

Even without a time machine to witness it, we can be certain that the evolutionary process has sorted away ancestors who failed to reproduce, leaving only those fit for the environment.

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

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#29

Post by marcus_holmes »

jeofken wrote: post #28
marcus_holmes wrote: post #24

Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.

Even without a time machine to witness it, we can be certain that the evolutionary process has sorted away ancestors who failed to reproduce, leaving only those fit for the environment. 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…

> wouldn’t logic deduction and educated guesses/models be the best method

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.

Re: We moderns are status-drunk

#30

Post by propater »

jeofken wrote: post #28
marcus_holmes wrote: post #24

Evolutionary psychology just smells of "making shit up". There's no way of proving any of these conjectures. They don't make any predictions that could be falsified. And they're not that useful - this doesn't explain anything in any way that we could actually use.

Even without a time machine to witness it, we can be certain that the evolutionary process has sorted away ancestors who failed to reproduce, leaving only those fit for the environment. 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…

"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."

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.

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