If you replace “status” with “relative social rank” in the OP do you disagree with it?
I disagree that “ordinal social rank” is a thing which matters in almost any situation. Value, esteem, and respect are great determiners of promotions, choice work assignments, etc. They are not, however, strictly a relative measure against other coworkers. It’s more a relative measure against the universe of possible employees. Which makes it more absolute than relative.
In fact, I suspect we experience very different things in our work and social life. I do recognize that there are situations where rank is more important than value, but I have trouble imagining functioning that way for very long. As a result I forget the diversity of human experience and that many people DO experience that.
Let me say I’m incredibly jealous! Functioning this way is a lot of work—that’s why I was trying to decrease the amount of work required with my simplified rule.
The wish for social circles to be more about value than rank was one of the main reasons I started posting on Less Wrong. It’s conversations like this which reassure me that it was a good idea—differences of opinion resolved without acrimony where both parties are better off the end. This does happen elsewhere in my life but not nearly often enough.
I agree that it should work like that but I don’t think that this is how it works in practice.
1. Examples of when ordinal social rank matters
Choice work assignments is an interesting example—I’d say that this is a case where ordinal social rank is the thing which matters most—there is generally no universe of possible employees to consider.
Promotions theoretically include a universe of possible employees. In practice I would say that there’s a minimum level of competence that you need to achieve to be considered for a promotion. Provided that at least one person has achieved that level of competence, the company is likely to just choose between the people they already have in the company rather than looking externally. Even if the company also looks externally the internal applicants start with a huge advantage in that they are a known quantity and know lots about the company already.
At this point the ordinal social rank of those who are sufficiently competent becomes the thing which matters.
2. How social emotions work in practice
Irrespective of the above, my general experience of people is that they consider ordinal social rank to be hugely important and that zero-sum games are common in this respect. I don’t argue that this is always a good idea (quite the opposite as I mentioned in the OP) but from observation of how people act.
Look at any group of teenagers and you will see them engaging in just this conduct. When we get older we generally decrease this behaviour (possibly because we get put into clear-ish hierarchical structures). However, the same emotions seem to govern much of the conduct which I witness—maybe my workplaces are just unusually dysfunctional in this regard.
If I may delve into evolutionary history (not an expert, ignore if you like!), our status emotions evolved when we were in a fixed-ish group of 50 odd people. Ordinal social rank would have been one of the main drivers of reproductive fitness (essentially like any chimps/wolves etc. competing to become the alpha). I don’t think we’ve had enough time in civilised society to de-evolve the tendency to act as though ordinal social rank is incredibly important, even when this is not advantageous to us.
I disagree that “ordinal social rank” is a thing which matters in almost any situation. Value, esteem, and respect are great determiners of promotions, choice work assignments, etc. They are not, however, strictly a relative measure against other coworkers. It’s more a relative measure against the universe of possible employees. Which makes it more absolute than relative.
In fact, I suspect we experience very different things in our work and social life. I do recognize that there are situations where rank is more important than value, but I have trouble imagining functioning that way for very long. As a result I forget the diversity of human experience and that many people DO experience that.
Let me say I’m incredibly jealous! Functioning this way is a lot of work—that’s why I was trying to decrease the amount of work required with my simplified rule.
The wish for social circles to be more about value than rank was one of the main reasons I started posting on Less Wrong. It’s conversations like this which reassure me that it was a good idea—differences of opinion resolved without acrimony where both parties are better off the end. This does happen elsewhere in my life but not nearly often enough.
I agree that it should work like that but I don’t think that this is how it works in practice.
1. Examples of when ordinal social rank matters
Choice work assignments is an interesting example—I’d say that this is a case where ordinal social rank is the thing which matters most—there is generally no universe of possible employees to consider.
Promotions theoretically include a universe of possible employees. In practice I would say that there’s a minimum level of competence that you need to achieve to be considered for a promotion. Provided that at least one person has achieved that level of competence, the company is likely to just choose between the people they already have in the company rather than looking externally. Even if the company also looks externally the internal applicants start with a huge advantage in that they are a known quantity and know lots about the company already.
At this point the ordinal social rank of those who are sufficiently competent becomes the thing which matters.
2. How social emotions work in practice
Irrespective of the above, my general experience of people is that they consider ordinal social rank to be hugely important and that zero-sum games are common in this respect. I don’t argue that this is always a good idea (quite the opposite as I mentioned in the OP) but from observation of how people act.
Look at any group of teenagers and you will see them engaging in just this conduct. When we get older we generally decrease this behaviour (possibly because we get put into clear-ish hierarchical structures). However, the same emotions seem to govern much of the conduct which I witness—maybe my workplaces are just unusually dysfunctional in this regard.
If I may delve into evolutionary history (not an expert, ignore if you like!), our status emotions evolved when we were in a fixed-ish group of 50 odd people. Ordinal social rank would have been one of the main drivers of reproductive fitness (essentially like any chimps/wolves etc. competing to become the alpha). I don’t think we’ve had enough time in civilised society to de-evolve the tendency to act as though ordinal social rank is incredibly important, even when this is not advantageous to us.