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.
Sensory evidence is definitely involved, but kinda indirectly. As I wrote in the latter: “The central situation where Approval Reward fires in my brain, is a situation where someone else (especially one of my friends or idols) feels a positive or negative feeling as they think about and interact with me.” I think it has to start with in-person interactions with other humans (and associated sensory evidence), but then there’s “generalization upstream of reward signals” such that rewards also get triggered in semantically similar situations, e.g. online interactions. And it’s intimately related to the fact that there’s a semantic overlap between “I am happy” and “you are happy”, via both involving a “happy” concept. It’s a trick that works for certain social things but can’t be applied to arbitrary concepts like inclusive genetic fitness.
I stand by my nitpick in other comment that you’re not using the word “concept” quite right. Or, hmm, maybe we can distinguish (A) “concept” = a latent variable in a specific human brain’s world-model, versus (B) “concept” = some platonic Natural Abstraction™ or whatever, whether or not any human is actually tracking it. Maybe I was confused because you’re using the (B) sense but I (mis)read it as the (A) sense? In AI alignment, we care especially about getting a concept in the (A) sense to be explicitly desired because that’s likelier to generalize out-of-distribution, e.g. via out-of-the-box plans. (Arguably.) There are indeed situations where the desires bestowed by Approval Reward come apart from social status as normally understood (cf. this section, plus the possibility that we’ll all get addicted to sycophantic digital friends upon future technological changes), and I wonder whether the whole question of “is Approval Reward exactly creating social status desire, or something that overlaps it but comes apart out-of-distribution?” might be a bit ill-defined via “painting the target around the arrow” in how we think about what social status even means.
(This is a narrow reply, not taking a stand on your larger points, and I wrote it quickly, sorry for errors.)
If it helps, my take is in Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch and its follow-up Social drives 2: “Approval Reward”, from norm-enforcement to status-seeking.
Sensory evidence is definitely involved, but kinda indirectly. As I wrote in the latter: “The central situation where Approval Reward fires in my brain, is a situation where someone else (especially one of my friends or idols) feels a positive or negative feeling as they think about and interact with me.” I think it has to start with in-person interactions with other humans (and associated sensory evidence), but then there’s “generalization upstream of reward signals” such that rewards also get triggered in semantically similar situations, e.g. online interactions. And it’s intimately related to the fact that there’s a semantic overlap between “I am happy” and “you are happy”, via both involving a “happy” concept. It’s a trick that works for certain social things but can’t be applied to arbitrary concepts like inclusive genetic fitness.
I stand by my nitpick in other comment that you’re not using the word “concept” quite right. Or, hmm, maybe we can distinguish (A) “concept” = a latent variable in a specific human brain’s world-model, versus (B) “concept” = some platonic Natural Abstraction™ or whatever, whether or not any human is actually tracking it. Maybe I was confused because you’re using the (B) sense but I (mis)read it as the (A) sense? In AI alignment, we care especially about getting a concept in the (A) sense to be explicitly desired because that’s likelier to generalize out-of-distribution, e.g. via out-of-the-box plans. (Arguably.) There are indeed situations where the desires bestowed by Approval Reward come apart from social status as normally understood (cf. this section, plus the possibility that we’ll all get addicted to sycophantic digital friends upon future technological changes), and I wonder whether the whole question of “is Approval Reward exactly creating social status desire, or something that overlaps it but comes apart out-of-distribution?” might be a bit ill-defined via “painting the target around the arrow” in how we think about what social status even means.
(This is a narrow reply, not taking a stand on your larger points, and I wrote it quickly, sorry for errors.)