Are social roles really that arbitrary though? I think of it as more of a market, where your position is determined by what you have to sell and for how much. For example, if you’re good looking, that means your goods are better. If you’re insecure, your prices are higher, and so on. Then people come together and work out a trade. Telling yourself that the market is a shared hallucination (or distributed computation, or whatever) won’t change anyone else’s incentives, so it won’t change your market position. Better to change your goods and asking price and let the market float you up.
What I think you’re highlighting are the constraints that emerge from (a) roles and scripts that have been chosen and (b) environmental factors. That second one is a bit like “The scene has to involve a stuffed bear somehow.” That certainly shapes what happens, but it doesn’t overwhelm the role choices. It just interacts with them.
Also, whether someone is considered attractive, or insecure, is often determined in large part by their position in the web. Yes, there can be genetic factors that make someone seem visibly more or less genetically fit… but it’s pretty impressive how attractive someone can be if it’s in common knowledge that everyone desires that person.
But these roles being so “arbitrary” doesn’t mean you can just switch them up. You’re right, they’re highly constrained by context. In the OP, I described this as a question of slack.
What I think you’re highlighting are the constraints that emerge from (a) roles and scripts that have been chosen and (b) environmental factors.
No mention of personal qualities that determine what you can supply to others and what you demand in return? Do you think anyone could have the right personal qualities if they were put in the right role? That seems wrong, I couldn’t lead the troops as well as Napoleon.
it’s pretty impressive how attractive someone can be if it’s in common knowledge that everyone desires that person.
Ah, I think we’re missing each other through different usage of terminology.
I now think you’re trying to point at individuals’ resources that they bring into the interactions with other individuals. E.g., assumedly there was something intrinsic to Napoleon that made him a great leader of troops. Let me know if I’m missing you there.
When I translate that into the framework I’m using in the OP, I focus on three things:
I would call factors that are intrinsic to individuals part of the “environment”. E.g., genetic gifts are environment. This is in the sense that a scene is shaped in part by what’s in the set, how energetic and responsive the players are, etc.
A lot of things that we think of as intrinsic to individuals are actually a result of their position in the web. Hence my comment about people’s attractiveness based on where they are in the web. (And yes, I agree, that happens in markets too. That’s not a disagreement. I think you’re noticing an overlap in the patterns that two different frameworks point at.)
People are usually prevented from reaching and holding roles they can’t execute. I posit that you in fact aren’t in a position like Napoleon’s in large part because you lack the native abilities in question, and the web is accounting for that.
Well, yeah. Your view seems reasonable enough on its own terms. The reason I’m being a bit naggy in the comments here is because I’ve got my own pet framework, which has some claim to being the next step after yours in terms of improving life outcomes :-) The market thing. I’ll try to explain why I like it so much.
There seems to be a natural progression in how people think about success:
1) Success comes from being better than others
2) Success comes from ~some mind hack~
3) Success comes from trading with others
Imagine you’re unhappy about your lot in life. The natural response is to grit your teeth and follow (1), trying to improve yourself so people flock to you. That’s a healthy response in many ways. But then there are so many self-help books explaining how reality is in your mind (2), and you can look at it differently to get ahead! That sounds like an amazing opportunity, but to me it’s not much different from (1). You’re still trying to improve your position, like everyone else, but now you’re also using shortcuts. Like everyone else.
The real jump is from (2) to (3), where you realize that you can’t succeed alone. You’ve got to pull someone else along. And once you accept that, you no longer have to worry about 15 year old kids who can beat you at everything. Their existence becomes irrelevant to your success, because comparative advantage allows you to make win-win trades with anyone on Earth, up or down the skill tree. You don’t have to beat anyone, or change the game, or change your mind, or do anything unusual at all. It’s one of the most liberating ideas I’ve ever encountered.
I like this a lot as well, I was operating under assumption (1) until probably 2 or 3 years ago, until I realized the main value I derive from being better than others is the warm fuzzy of immediately teaching them the thing. So success (1) is self-defeating.
To fully appreciate this I had to disentangle the warm fuzzy of “pretending to teach while lording over” which is admittedly good but nowhere as good as actually watching the other person improve because of my efforts.
Your view seems reasonable enough on its own terms. The reason I’m being a bit naggy in the comments here is because I’ve got my own pet framework, which has some claim to being the next step after yours in terms of improving life outcomes
Valentine isn’t a hedgehog about this framework. The point of calling it a fake-framework is to make it clear that it isn’t the one-framework to explain everything. Given that frameworks are useful intuition pumps having multiple useful frameworks allows you to generate more useful ideas.
Not all value exchange is about market-based trading. David Ronfeld lays out Tribes/Hierarchies/Markets/Networks in “In Search of How Societies Work”.
When I ask on StackExchange a question I don’t think it’s helpful to think of how I trade with the person who will answer my question.
It’s more useful to think in terms of roles. There are certain cultural exceptions by the StackExchange community and when I write StackExchange answers it’s more useful to think about living up to those norms than thinking about how to trade with people answering.
StackExchange follows network norms of value creation.
Huh? StackExchange has karma! So does LW. The value exchange mechanism is exposed for all to see. Reputation systems are designed markets. They also complement goods markets (Amazon, eBay, Yelp). And there’s intermediate cases like social media, where companies promote their content by making it upvote-worthy. Thinking that you do stuff to follow norms misses the point: you follow norms to make a profit.
Popper made the point that one of the problems with Marxism is that the Marxist has no problem to see any conflict as being about class struggle. In the same way you can see every problem as being about market and fit them into that perspective.
On StackExchange you find bad question and answer getting downvotes even when that costs the people who downvote karma. You wouldn’t expect that behavior to happen as often it it would be a market where participants purely optimize for getting their questions answered, earning karma and badges.
People desire to do work on StackExchange that doesn’t bring them karma. People work through review queues even when that doesn’t bring them karma to help the project.
If you start to look at a problem with multiple lenses you see more aspects of it and that helps generating new solutions.
Trade is one way to have an economic interaction where value is created, because each of us might value something twice as much as the other, so when we trade, we get more value. But we can also create value where no value existed before. If you and I play a game together that we both enjoy, we’re not trading something: we’re creating new experiences that we value. If you and I start a company together, we might be selling our products on a market, but the value we’re creating by working together is probably something that neither of us had on our own, therefore not well-modelled as a “trade”.
Some might argue this is the same as 3, but it seems like an important distinction to me, and very relevant to improv, also.
I would call factors that are intrinsic to individuals part of the “environment”.
Why? If you think this, then I start suspecting you might consider everything to be ‘arbitrary’. What does ‘not arbitrary’ look like?
Like, let’s say I have a genetic gift like photographic memory. And then I start playing the role as a person who remembers things that they’ve seen. Maybe people make jokes about it. Or they ask me what was in the paper this morning. Would this still be considered an arbitrary social role?
I now think the word “arbitrary” is shifting meaning around as different people use it. I’d like to taboo it.
Here are some things that, by my model, contribute to defining someone’s position in the web:
Their genes.
The situation that they were born into. (E.g., who their parents are, in the web.)
Major physical events around them. (E.g., earthquakes.)
Physical constraints of their environment. (E.g., living in non-fertile land.)
The positions in the web that people they interact with hold.
I doubt that’s exhaustive — but I think it might be close.
I’m reading a bunch of this thread as folk interpreting me as saying that genetic gifts don’t matter. That’s not my stance. I think genetic gifts do in fact matter — but I suspect I think they matter differently than other people think they do. E.g., many people might think that someone is a natural leader when what’s really going on is just that they’re tall and can easily put on muscle and have symmetric features and were thus raised to practice playing a role that looks leader-like. But it’s helpful to the web for people to think and talk as though the people they’ve chosen for leadership roles have various virtues that make them worthy.
I think it’s helpful to distinguish between recursive factors (your role helps define my role, which helps define your role, etc.) and non-recursive factors (e.g., being tall, or being in a drought). The non-recursive factors define the things that the recursive ones have to address. But the recursive ones define what people treat as real about the non-recursive ones. That doesn’t depend on whether the thing is intrinsic to a person (as with genes) or not (as with rain). E.g., climate change has a similar kind of “web-woven reality dominates perception of physical reality” thing going on as with people who claim that Tally McTallface just seems more Presidential.
Hence my wanting to think of genes as part of the “scene” rather than as part of someone’s “role”.
Like, let’s say I have a genetic gift like photographic memory. And then I start playing the role as a person who remembers things that they’ve seen. Maybe people make jokes about it. Or they ask me what was in the paper this morning. Would this still be considered an arbitrary social role?
Continuing my tabooing of “arbitrary”:
I don’t think “a person who remembers things that they’ve seen” is a role in the sense I’m talking about. That describes a function, not a position in the social web.
If there were always a person in every group whom others turned to in order to remember things, then I’d expect it to evolve into a role in the sense I mean. But in that case, you just hope that someone who’s actually good at remembering things falls into that role. If that role were really high-status, you might expect it to fall to people who are really convincing rather than people who are accurate whenever there’s a difference. The question isn’t “Who would an impartial observer think best performs the tasks of that role?” The question is, “Who can play that role in a way that makes the scene work?”
Also, I have a genetic gift that gives me absurd amounts of physical flexibility. I could have been a circus contortionist if I’d wanted to be. And… the web doesn’t care. It basically never comes into play. Why? Well, there’s no role anywhere near me that takes advantage of that gift.
So, neither having a gift nor lacking it defines what position in the web someone plays.
But obviously genes play a role. E.g., basically everyone in the web is human.
many people might think that someone is a natural leader when what’s really going on is just that they’re tall and can easily put on muscle and have symmetric features and were thus raised to practice playing a role that looks leader-like. But it’s helpful to the web for people to think and talk as though the people they’ve chosen for leadership roles have various virtues that make them worthy.
FWIW, my current belief is that ‘tall’ functions as something like a Schelling point. it only slightly grants ‘leadership ability’ (in that, if you’re tall, i’m more likely to be able to SEE you in a crowd, and if you wanted to give me directions, that seems relevant; also taller means i have to look up to see your face, and this costs ME more than YOU, and so given you get natural energy savings in interactions, this is some indication of who has more resources; i expect things like this to compound).
anyway, being tall was probably a much more useful leadership ability way back when, but now it is not a super good indicator.
but given the lack of other more correlated signals that are fast to assess, tall is a natural Schelling point over short. and having Schelling points for this seems useful.
when i enter a room, i want to immediately be able to guess what people’s relative status positions are. ideally before i hear them say anything. (because, as you say, i just wanna know what my role is goddamnit!)
my sense is there’s something that bothers you about ‘tall’ ~ ‘leader’ and it doesn’t seem to bother me. so that’s where i get curious.
This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from “tall” to “leader” is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.
The discussion about leadership reminded me that siderea has written an absolutely fascinating analysis (part 1, part 2) about leadership; the one problem with the analysis is that it basically requires you to have read at least the first 65 pages of Watership Down. But if you have done that, it’s an excellent analysis about how leadership (or kingship as she calls it) isn’t a really a formal position in the way that we think about it, but rather about you relate to others in the social web, and how those others relate to you in turn. That seems like a very appropriate perspective for this thread. A couple of quotes:
Adams understands that, contrary to everything our society teaches us, Kingship is not a trait of individuals, but a way of relating. Watership Down is a thorough illustration of the idea that Kingship is a relationship between an individual and a group, and between that individual and the members of that group, which in turn orders those group members’ relationships with each others, and outsiders, and the world about them, and thus shapes the very nature and functioning of the group. [...]
Hazel is looking after the well-being of the whole of the group and the individual members of the group. Hazel takes responsibility for helping Pipkin’s here, and for figuring out a solution to the groups’ flagging strength. He enlists the strength of one to help remedy the weakness of another.
Part of that “ordering and generative” thing about Kings is that they catalyze relationships among their group members. In some sense, Dandelion didn’t need Hazel to tell him to tell a story. He didn’t need Hazel’s permission. He could have realized it would have been useful and volunteered, “Hey, how about a nice story!” But he didn’t. It didn’t occur to him at all. As far as we know, it never occurs to him to consider the state of the group or what he might do to help his fellow rabbits. Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t know that Dandelion ever says or does a selfish or cruel thing; from the first page to the last, he is loyal, brave, and true. I do not mean to say that Dandelion was thoughtless or bad. Dandelion is wonderful.
But the difference between Hazel and Dandelion is that Hazel made the group’s problems his problems and addressed them, and Dandelion didn’t. And that is Kingship. The part I’m calling caring.
Something that I’m still faintly embarrassed about is that when I first read Watership Down all this was rather lost on me. I literally didn’t recognize that any of this had anything do to with what we might term leadership. I mean, not only didn’t I realize that Hazel was showing leadership in these various ways, I literally didn’t realize that Hazel was functioning as any sort of leader in any way. I conceived of the story through this part and on a bit further as “Hazel and Fiver decide to go their way and other rabbits come with them and they’re all peers”.
It completely blew by me that Hazel is making most of the decisions, that members of the group defer to his decisions and look to him for answers, that he tells or suggests things to do and the other rabbits do them, that if you were to draw a graph of who talked to whom in the story, you would see a diagram which was almost entirely an asterisk, with Hazel in the center.
I literally didn’t notice any of this dynamic. So when later on the question is put explicitly whether Hazel is Chief Rabbit for this band, it shocked me. It hadn’t occurred to me in any way that that might be so.
Because I was raised in a society that says that Kingship looks like The Threarah, not like Hazel. Because I was raised in a society which is deeply sick about authority, leadership, and Kingship.
oh, maybe you’re only bothered by people claiming a hand-wavy ‘natural leadership’ thing when in fact it’s stuff like ‘they’re tall and handsome’. i would agree that is not ideal than being more aware of this kind of thing. belief reporting seems to help suss it out?
My guess is that about 70% of attractiveness is explained by objective factors, or at least highly inter-subjective factors that are not that dependent on the role someone is playing. There are some studies on this that I read a while ago, this one seems relevant but not the one I remember: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9106275
I would be wary of thinking of social roles as a market. There’s something about social interactions that isn’t market related, and bringing up prices seems to be able to make people’s relationships less fulfilling. At least according to Dan Ariely in the book Predictably Irrational.
″...once a social norm is trumped by a market norm—it will rarely return.”
Quick Googling of market vs social norms (or some variation on that) brought up tons of links, but this one does an okay job of summarizing what the book said about it:
There’s something about social interactions that isn’t market related, and bringing up prices seems to be able to make people’s relationships less fulfilling.
Agree with the second part—trade is low status (because it means people aren’t rewarding you for inherent qualities). Disagree with the first part—trade is still what’s going on, just not with money. It’s always a good idea to understand what the other person is buying from you and at what price. The world is full of people who thought they were being rewarded for inherent qualities. Then they accidentally withdrew the thing that was being traded, and lost relationships as a result. Eliezer had a nice essay about it recently.
Are social roles really that arbitrary though? I think of it as more of a market, where your position is determined by what you have to sell and for how much. For example, if you’re good looking, that means your goods are better. If you’re insecure, your prices are higher, and so on. Then people come together and work out a trade. Telling yourself that the market is a shared hallucination (or distributed computation, or whatever) won’t change anyone else’s incentives, so it won’t change your market position. Better to change your goods and asking price and let the market float you up.
Yes, I think so.
What I think you’re highlighting are the constraints that emerge from (a) roles and scripts that have been chosen and (b) environmental factors. That second one is a bit like “The scene has to involve a stuffed bear somehow.” That certainly shapes what happens, but it doesn’t overwhelm the role choices. It just interacts with them.
Also, whether someone is considered attractive, or insecure, is often determined in large part by their position in the web. Yes, there can be genetic factors that make someone seem visibly more or less genetically fit… but it’s pretty impressive how attractive someone can be if it’s in common knowledge that everyone desires that person.
But these roles being so “arbitrary” doesn’t mean you can just switch them up. You’re right, they’re highly constrained by context. In the OP, I described this as a question of slack.
No mention of personal qualities that determine what you can supply to others and what you demand in return? Do you think anyone could have the right personal qualities if they were put in the right role? That seems wrong, I couldn’t lead the troops as well as Napoleon.
The same thing happens in markets.
Ah, I think we’re missing each other through different usage of terminology.
I now think you’re trying to point at individuals’ resources that they bring into the interactions with other individuals. E.g., assumedly there was something intrinsic to Napoleon that made him a great leader of troops. Let me know if I’m missing you there.
When I translate that into the framework I’m using in the OP, I focus on three things:
I would call factors that are intrinsic to individuals part of the “environment”. E.g., genetic gifts are environment. This is in the sense that a scene is shaped in part by what’s in the set, how energetic and responsive the players are, etc.
A lot of things that we think of as intrinsic to individuals are actually a result of their position in the web. Hence my comment about people’s attractiveness based on where they are in the web. (And yes, I agree, that happens in markets too. That’s not a disagreement. I think you’re noticing an overlap in the patterns that two different frameworks point at.)
People are usually prevented from reaching and holding roles they can’t execute. I posit that you in fact aren’t in a position like Napoleon’s in large part because you lack the native abilities in question, and the web is accounting for that.
Well, yeah. Your view seems reasonable enough on its own terms. The reason I’m being a bit naggy in the comments here is because I’ve got my own pet framework, which has some claim to being the next step after yours in terms of improving life outcomes :-) The market thing. I’ll try to explain why I like it so much.
There seems to be a natural progression in how people think about success:
1) Success comes from being better than others
2) Success comes from ~some mind hack~
3) Success comes from trading with others
Imagine you’re unhappy about your lot in life. The natural response is to grit your teeth and follow (1), trying to improve yourself so people flock to you. That’s a healthy response in many ways. But then there are so many self-help books explaining how reality is in your mind (2), and you can look at it differently to get ahead! That sounds like an amazing opportunity, but to me it’s not much different from (1). You’re still trying to improve your position, like everyone else, but now you’re also using shortcuts. Like everyone else.
The real jump is from (2) to (3), where you realize that you can’t succeed alone. You’ve got to pull someone else along. And once you accept that, you no longer have to worry about 15 year old kids who can beat you at everything. Their existence becomes irrelevant to your success, because comparative advantage allows you to make win-win trades with anyone on Earth, up or down the skill tree. You don’t have to beat anyone, or change the game, or change your mind, or do anything unusual at all. It’s one of the most liberating ideas I’ve ever encountered.
I like this a lot as well, I was operating under assumption (1) until probably 2 or 3 years ago, until I realized the main value I derive from being better than others is the warm fuzzy of immediately teaching them the thing. So success (1) is self-defeating.
To fully appreciate this I had to disentangle the warm fuzzy of “pretending to teach while lording over” which is admittedly good but nowhere as good as actually watching the other person improve because of my efforts.
I’d be excited to see a top-level post from you elaborating on this with some examples.
Valentine isn’t a hedgehog about this framework. The point of calling it a fake-framework is to make it clear that it isn’t the one-framework to explain everything. Given that frameworks are useful intuition pumps having multiple useful frameworks allows you to generate more useful ideas.
Not all value exchange is about market-based trading. David Ronfeld lays out Tribes/Hierarchies/Markets/Networks in “In Search of How Societies Work”.
When I ask on StackExchange a question I don’t think it’s helpful to think of how I trade with the person who will answer my question.
It’s more useful to think in terms of roles. There are certain cultural exceptions by the StackExchange community and when I write StackExchange answers it’s more useful to think about living up to those norms than thinking about how to trade with people answering.
StackExchange follows network norms of value creation.
Huh? StackExchange has karma! So does LW. The value exchange mechanism is exposed for all to see. Reputation systems are designed markets. They also complement goods markets (Amazon, eBay, Yelp). And there’s intermediate cases like social media, where companies promote their content by making it upvote-worthy. Thinking that you do stuff to follow norms misses the point: you follow norms to make a profit.
Popper made the point that one of the problems with Marxism is that the Marxist has no problem to see any conflict as being about class struggle. In the same way you can see every problem as being about market and fit them into that perspective.
On StackExchange you find bad question and answer getting downvotes even when that costs the people who downvote karma. You wouldn’t expect that behavior to happen as often it it would be a market where participants purely optimize for getting their questions answered, earning karma and badges.
People desire to do work on StackExchange that doesn’t bring them karma. People work through review queues even when that doesn’t bring them karma to help the project.
If you start to look at a problem with multiple lenses you see more aspects of it and that helps generating new solutions.
I would add:
4) Success comes from collaborating with others
Trade is one way to have an economic interaction where value is created, because each of us might value something twice as much as the other, so when we trade, we get more value. But we can also create value where no value existed before. If you and I play a game together that we both enjoy, we’re not trading something: we’re creating new experiences that we value. If you and I start a company together, we might be selling our products on a market, but the value we’re creating by working together is probably something that neither of us had on our own, therefore not well-modelled as a “trade”.
Some might argue this is the same as 3, but it seems like an important distinction to me, and very relevant to improv, also.
Why? If you think this, then I start suspecting you might consider everything to be ‘arbitrary’. What does ‘not arbitrary’ look like?
Like, let’s say I have a genetic gift like photographic memory. And then I start playing the role as a person who remembers things that they’ve seen. Maybe people make jokes about it. Or they ask me what was in the paper this morning. Would this still be considered an arbitrary social role?
I now think the word “arbitrary” is shifting meaning around as different people use it. I’d like to taboo it.
Here are some things that, by my model, contribute to defining someone’s position in the web:
Their genes.
The situation that they were born into. (E.g., who their parents are, in the web.)
Major physical events around them. (E.g., earthquakes.)
Physical constraints of their environment. (E.g., living in non-fertile land.)
The positions in the web that people they interact with hold.
I doubt that’s exhaustive — but I think it might be close.
I’m reading a bunch of this thread as folk interpreting me as saying that genetic gifts don’t matter. That’s not my stance. I think genetic gifts do in fact matter — but I suspect I think they matter differently than other people think they do. E.g., many people might think that someone is a natural leader when what’s really going on is just that they’re tall and can easily put on muscle and have symmetric features and were thus raised to practice playing a role that looks leader-like. But it’s helpful to the web for people to think and talk as though the people they’ve chosen for leadership roles have various virtues that make them worthy.
I think it’s helpful to distinguish between recursive factors (your role helps define my role, which helps define your role, etc.) and non-recursive factors (e.g., being tall, or being in a drought). The non-recursive factors define the things that the recursive ones have to address. But the recursive ones define what people treat as real about the non-recursive ones. That doesn’t depend on whether the thing is intrinsic to a person (as with genes) or not (as with rain). E.g., climate change has a similar kind of “web-woven reality dominates perception of physical reality” thing going on as with people who claim that Tally McTallface just seems more Presidential.
Hence my wanting to think of genes as part of the “scene” rather than as part of someone’s “role”.
Continuing my tabooing of “arbitrary”:
I don’t think “a person who remembers things that they’ve seen” is a role in the sense I’m talking about. That describes a function, not a position in the social web.
If there were always a person in every group whom others turned to in order to remember things, then I’d expect it to evolve into a role in the sense I mean. But in that case, you just hope that someone who’s actually good at remembering things falls into that role. If that role were really high-status, you might expect it to fall to people who are really convincing rather than people who are accurate whenever there’s a difference. The question isn’t “Who would an impartial observer think best performs the tasks of that role?” The question is, “Who can play that role in a way that makes the scene work?”
Also, I have a genetic gift that gives me absurd amounts of physical flexibility. I could have been a circus contortionist if I’d wanted to be. And… the web doesn’t care. It basically never comes into play. Why? Well, there’s no role anywhere near me that takes advantage of that gift.
So, neither having a gift nor lacking it defines what position in the web someone plays.
But obviously genes play a role. E.g., basically everyone in the web is human.
FWIW, my current belief is that ‘tall’ functions as something like a Schelling point. it only slightly grants ‘leadership ability’ (in that, if you’re tall, i’m more likely to be able to SEE you in a crowd, and if you wanted to give me directions, that seems relevant; also taller means i have to look up to see your face, and this costs ME more than YOU, and so given you get natural energy savings in interactions, this is some indication of who has more resources; i expect things like this to compound).
anyway, being tall was probably a much more useful leadership ability way back when, but now it is not a super good indicator.
but given the lack of other more correlated signals that are fast to assess, tall is a natural Schelling point over short. and having Schelling points for this seems useful.
when i enter a room, i want to immediately be able to guess what people’s relative status positions are. ideally before i hear them say anything. (because, as you say, i just wanna know what my role is goddamnit!)
my sense is there’s something that bothers you about ‘tall’ ~ ‘leader’ and it doesn’t seem to bother me. so that’s where i get curious.
This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from “tall” to “leader” is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.
The discussion about leadership reminded me that siderea has written an absolutely fascinating analysis (part 1, part 2) about leadership; the one problem with the analysis is that it basically requires you to have read at least the first 65 pages of Watership Down. But if you have done that, it’s an excellent analysis about how leadership (or kingship as she calls it) isn’t a really a formal position in the way that we think about it, but rather about you relate to others in the social web, and how those others relate to you in turn. That seems like a very appropriate perspective for this thread. A couple of quotes:
Tallness is also reasonably strong evidence of good genes and nutrition.
Who do you think is a better director of MIRI: Nate Soares, or Luke Muelhauser?
I think the height thing is a holdover from childhood: someone taller than you is older and more adult-like, so you should do what they say.
oh, maybe you’re only bothered by people claiming a hand-wavy ‘natural leadership’ thing when in fact it’s stuff like ‘they’re tall and handsome’. i would agree that is not ideal than being more aware of this kind of thing. belief reporting seems to help suss it out?
My guess is that about 70% of attractiveness is explained by objective factors, or at least highly inter-subjective factors that are not that dependent on the role someone is playing. There are some studies on this that I read a while ago, this one seems relevant but not the one I remember: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9106275
I would be wary of thinking of social roles as a market. There’s something about social interactions that isn’t market related, and bringing up prices seems to be able to make people’s relationships less fulfilling. At least according to Dan Ariely in the book Predictably Irrational.
″...once a social norm is trumped by a market norm—it will rarely return.”
Quick Googling of market vs social norms (or some variation on that) brought up tons of links, but this one does an okay job of summarizing what the book said about it:
https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-are-crowding-out-social-norms-and-society-is-poorer-as-a-result/
Agree with the second part—trade is low status (because it means people aren’t rewarding you for inherent qualities). Disagree with the first part—trade is still what’s going on, just not with money. It’s always a good idea to understand what the other person is buying from you and at what price. The world is full of people who thought they were being rewarded for inherent qualities. Then they accidentally withdrew the thing that was being traded, and lost relationships as a result. Eliezer had a nice essay about it recently.