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Who wants to play the status game?

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Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#31

Post by czbond »

mapcars wrote: post #23
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also like how they completely ignore Marx/philosophers who actually study societial inequality, with those who studied logic. Also the whole Ubermensch thing is basically a solution to this, by essentially fixing the whole system with an ideal person.

>fixing the whole system with an ideal person. How can non-ideal persons define what an ideas person is? This is just a mental game.

I don't see why non-ideal cannot define ideal, but within a small standard deviation is possible.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#32

Post by keiferski »

Alternatively, opt out of the status game and try to construct and pursue your own definition of excellence, rather than simply defining it in terms of your position in the social hierarchy.

"Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity-I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.

It is the misfortune of active men that their activity is almost always a bit irrational. For example, one must not inquire of the money-gathering banker what the purpose for his restless activity is: it is irrational. Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar."

- Nietzsche

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#33

Post by czbond »

This is an absolute engineer thing to say in the realm of efficiency, logic, and disliker-of-the-boredom-smalltalk-is, but I cannot wait until can meet and through a digital display see, then have matched our common interests. That way I don't have to pretend to care about a football game if I have nothing to add about it, if we can connect over something we both are passionate about.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#34

Post by bob33212 »

bernawil wrote: post #28
stared wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is closely related to the "scalar fallacy" (see http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2011/01/scalar... ; the quotation from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8132525 ): > The scalar fallacy is the false but pervasive assumption that real-world things (hotels, sandwiches, people, mutual funds, chemo drugs, whatever) have some single-dimension ordering of "goodness". > When you project a multi-dimensiona…

I don't get it. Is it related to rankings, star systems, etc? > pervasive assumption I think whenever "rating" anything people are aware that it's a subjective and probably useless number meant for convenience than accuracy.

A 3d vector of 2m by 8m by .1m can be projected on to a plane in a wide range of scalars.

When someone says that someone else is smart because they got a 100 on a test they are taking a multidimensional attribute and projecting it onto a single dimension.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#35

Post by fma »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

This has given me food for thought. My kids go to school in an area that has a mix of incomes. My average day might involve working from home, or it might involving traveling internationally to visit $PROMINENT_BRAND_NAME to deliver consulting. When I talk to the other parents I want to reveal some aspects of my life so we have something to talk about. However I can easily come across as boasting (and, to some extent…

Ask them about their kids and just let them do the talking. A natural conversation usually flows from there.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#36

Post by bob33212 »

Insanity wrote: post #5
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

This has given me food for thought. My kids go to school in an area that has a mix of incomes. My average day might involve working from home, or it might involving traveling internationally to visit $PROMINENT_BRAND_NAME to deliver consulting. When I talk to the other parents I want to reveal some aspects of my life so we have something to talk about. However I can easily come across as boasting (and, to some extent…

For what it's worth - if the other parents bring up the conversation of what you do or what you did that week, that's fine in my opinion. It's hardly boasting and you're not the one who initiated the topic anyway. If you're always the one bringing up your trips to fancy clients, that's a different story. :P

Consulting is an interesting one because there are people who would pity you for having to be away from your family dealing with corporate politics. Others may feel jealous of you high profile and high salary.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#37

Post by code4tee »

Status only matters if the other party cares about it.

The ultimate status game is truly showing that you don’t care that the other person is X, has done X, their dad/uncle is X, wants you to think X but rather are dealing with the person in front of you right then and there and what they are able to bring to the table at that time.

The reverse is incredibly powerful too. Those that have been most impressive to me throughout life are when they seemed like a totally “normal” person and then later I found out something about their “status” that others would have gloated endlessly about.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#38

Post by stared »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #26
dmos62 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single dimension fallacy might be a good alternative name. I'd add that often things don't have a single ordering of goodness at all. Like a tomato sauce: some people like it thick, others watery, others chunky; so it actually has at least 3 orderings.

Well, the general solution of economists is to assume that every person has their own ordering. This doesn't work for Spectrum Arguments by Larry Temkin, though. A typical argument goes like this: Suppose alternative A gives you an extremely high level of well-being for a month. B brings a little bit less well-being than A for two months. C a little bit less well-being for four months, and so forth. In pairwise compa…

Once you go to multidimensional vector spaces, you don't need order. For example, the classic rock-paper-scissors can be modeled with 3 points in 2d.

This has fundamental implications, as many activities do have this cyclical parts (see also such decomposition for vector fields, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_decomposition).

Vide Reinforcement Learning for StarCraft 2: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-leve...

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#39

Post by friendlybus »

The article contradicts itself. It calls for an end to status games and at the same time holds up the class system as an easy out for determine status because the class takes care of it for you. That is still a status game.

The class system does not substitute individual status relations for an institutional approach, it just ignores them.

I lived and worked in London for 5 years and used to an individualistic perspective I found it very difficult when you spend years sticking your neck out for people and doing the right thing is rewarded with institution incompetence and staff that will let you down you for a broken system and marginal personal gain.

The society becomes so stratified that any reasonable increase or decrease on your hierarchical position means to completely change your social circle and living circumstances.

Hearing a coworker show off by misnaming the area she lived in so she could self correct multiple times demonstrating how close she lived to an area slightly higher up the chain than she really lived is something I could do without.

With individual status and addressing you know where you stand with people. The class hierarchy leads to slavish wonderment in the presence of the higher classes even if they spit in your face or verbally abuse you.

Please sir may I have some more? No oliver, not today.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#40

Post by saiya-jin »

code4tee wrote: post #37

Status only matters if the other party cares about it. The ultimate status game is truly showing that you don’t care that the other person is X, has done X, their dad/uncle is X, wants you to think X but rather are dealing with the person in front of you right then and there and what they are able to bring to the table at that time. The reverse is incredibly powerful too. Those that have been most impressive to me th…

This mindset brings such a peace of mind. You can't impress me with anything payable in money, empty statements, family credentials etc. Only your actions define your relationship with me. If you mess it up, I will act with you accordingly. If I will consider you a bad influence to my kid, you 2 will simply not meet, even if you would be his grandparent.

To make things even easier, I apply this to absolutely everybody, friends, family, colleagues, unknowns. For some reason, not many people are willing to do so, and always have double 'meter' for ie close family. Maybe I am a bit broken with this, but damn it makes life simple, honest and steady, relationships are crystal clear. My opinions on persons don't change, unless they change (which they don't because frankly nobody really does, at least not enough to change overall attitude).

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