DISQUS

treefroggy · 3 years ago

After todays game, it's the Mayor of Des Moines. Maybe even the dog catcher.

dilys · 3 years ago

Just some odds and ends of response.

I remember years ago in the NYTimes a report that many people experience a rush of endorphins when they experience themselves as powerful or of high status in a group. That's a major motivator. Doesn't mean however than in non-competing categories high status couldn't belong to different members of the group, gaining successive attention and regaining the spotlight before the endorphins wear off.

Status might have another neurological component, the opposite of the pariah. The pariah fears isolation and death, lack of access to the tribe's resources. Status allows us to tell ourselves stories that, in the crunch, we'll be toward the front of the line at the food trough, or t the flight out of the hurricane path.

In both cases, it seems that the subject's perception of his status is the important thing. It would be interesting to devise a self-report of perceived status of self and others, and cross-refer that to an emotional index of anxiety and contentment. The relationship of status to anxiety or happpiness may not be linear, BTW.

Austen · 3 years ago

"What we do is encourage a decentralized entrepreneurial culture where status domains without number may bloom."

Amen. I dig this post. Seems there's a backdoor pro- decentralized culture point here too: viz. more status domains means some folks are understanding and evaluating one another by employing more and richer categories. Which means: more social pressure toward mental alertness and agility, since which categories to apply in which context is a trickier matter (than it is, say, under a dictatorship where the status ponds are fewer, less diverse, more dictated). Which means a marginally cleverer, more mindful populace. Or something like that. Point is, hurrah! for being able to win at life in lotsa different ways.

Rafal Smigrodzki · 3 years ago

I posted the comments below to a transhumanist list I like:

Just think about it. It is not wrong at all to engage in positional games. Pissing contests are not the reviled zero-sum games that e.g. Nick Bostrom would like to ban.

Let thousands of unequal flowers bloom, each higher than all others, in one of the world's infinite dimensions. Burn the atavistic neurons of envy out of your brains, fellow transhumanists. Become better persons by being better, not equal.

Let the New Revolution begin:

Liberte-Inegalite-Atomisation!

Rafal

Einzige · 3 years ago

Your post is very interesting, and it reminds me of a movie I saw once in my health class in high school, showing a number of binary chicken interactions. Our assignment was to keep track of the outcomes and then list the pecking order.

What the chicken study (and my own direct experience with chickens and people) suggests to me is that the most important aspect of "status" is the self-belief. Outside of the position-revealing behavior itself, there was nothing externally obvious about any of the chickens that made you think, "Oh, yes, THAT's the top chicken." So, it must be something inherent in the chicken's thought process, and, by extension, in our own.

Put the Mayor and the Quarterback and the Philosopher and the Mafia Don and the Chief Justice and the Garbage Man in a room together, and *someone* will percolate to the top of the pecking order. You and I might think that the quarterback and the philosopher are the greatest guys in the world, but perhaps they've got some self-esteem issues that, in the position-jockie, end up taking them out of the running early.

I guess this is not so much a criticism of your point, but more of an additional aspect, for what it's worth.

asd · 2 years ago

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