I bet that Steve Byrnes can point out a bunch of specific sensory evidence that the brain uses to construct the status concept (stuff like gaze length of conspecifics, or something?), but the human motivation system isn’t just optimizing for those physical proxy measures, or people wouldn’t be motivated to get prestige on internet forums where people have reputations but never see each other’s faces.
Curious to see what Steven Byrnes would actually say here. I fed your comment and Byrnes’ twoposts on social status to Opus 4.5, it thought for 3m 40s (!) and ended up arguing he’d disagree with your social status example:
Byrnes explicitly argues the opposite position in §2.2.2 of the second post. He writes:
“I don’t currently think there’s an innate drive to ‘mostly lead’ per se. Rather, I think there’s an innate drive that we might loosely describe as ‘a drive to feel liked / admired’… and also an innate drive that we might loosely describe as ‘a drive to feel feared’. These drives are just upstream of gaining an ability to ‘mostly lead’.”
And more pointedly:
“I’m avoiding a common thing that evolutionary psychologists do (e.g. Secret of Our Success by Henrich), which is to point to particular human behaviors and just say that they’re evolved—for example, they might say there’s an ‘innate drive to be a leader’, or ‘innate drive to be dominant’, or ‘innate drive to imitate successful people’, and so on. I think those are basically all ‘at the wrong level’ to be neuroscientifically plausible.”
So Byrnes is explicitly rejecting the claim that evolution installed “status-seeking” as a goal at the level Eli describes.
Byrnes proposes a three-layer architecture: first, there are primitive innate drives—”feel liked/admired” and “feel feared”—which are still at the feeling level, not the abstract-concept level. Second, there’s a very general learning mechanism (which he discusses extensively in his valence series, particularly §4.5–4.6) that figures out what actions and situations produce those feelings in the local environment. Third, there are some low-level sensory adaptations (like “an innate brainstem reflex to look at people’s faces”) that feed into the learning system. Status-seeking behavior emerges from this combination, but “status” itself isn’t the installed goal.
Why does this matter? Eli presents something like a dichotomy: either (A) evolution can only do sensory-level proxies that break in novel contexts (like male preferences for big breasts, which don’t update when you learn a woman is infertile), or (B) evolution can install abstract concepts as goals (like status). Byrnes’ model offers a third option: evolution installs feeling-level drives plus a general learning mechanism. The learning mechanism explains why status-seeking transfers to internet forums—the primitive drive to “feel liked/admired” still triggers when you get upvotes, and the learning system figures out how to get more of that—without requiring that “status” itself be the installed goal. This third option actually supports the original claim Eli is arguing against. Evolution didn’t need to install “status” as a concept; it installed feelings + learning, and the abstract behavior emerged.
(mods, let me know if this is slop and I’ll take it down)
Curious to see what Steven Byrnes would actually say here. I fed your comment and Byrnes’ two posts on social status to Opus 4.5, it thought for 3m 40s (!) and ended up arguing he’d disagree with your social status example:
(mods, let me know if this is slop and I’ll take it down)