[Link] Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton speaks about Status Anxiety
There is nowhere where I’ve witnessed (and felt) more status anxiety expressed and talked about than in Lesswrong. I tried to partly dispel the mith at least as it regards sexuality.
People talk about status in all its forms and shapes a lot here. Which made me wonder, what do you think of Alain de Botton’s opinions on “status addiction” in western societies?
Really? I think status anxiety is probably everywhere and I have no reason to expect that LWers are more status anxious than most people. Are you sure you aren’t just noticing that people talk about status more on LW that in other places? I notice way more status anxiety among, say, high school kids. They just don’t have a language for talking about it.
Having lived in L.A. before the Bay Area, my impression is that the population of L.A. is (on average) significantly more status-anxious than the Bay Area LW community, but the population of L.A. is (on average) much less able to talk coherently about it.
People from the Bay Area famously have contempt for Los Angeles and SoCal culture. One way of showing status is by conspicuously showing that you don’t care about the status signifiers of another group.
By “witnessed” I meant: Read and heard.
Usually I do not witness the internal experience of other people.
I had no intention of making the claim that it is felt by people here more than people elsewhere. And surely, as mentioned by you and shminux and lukeprog, it isn’t. That seemed too obvious to be stated, it is just that the topic arises to the surface of speech here, whereas it remains under the confusion armor elsewhere.
But hey, as Dan Gilbert would have it, if someone thinks your text is confusing, it is, by definition, confusing. So I’ll edit it as ” more status anxiety expressed and talked about than in Lesswrong”
If that were true, one of the first replies would have been a status-lowering response of the form “you can’t be going out much”.
You may be confusing status anxiety and awareness of the peculiarly confusing nature of status, which can be a source of anxiety, but is (I suspect) different from what de Botton calls status anxiety.
As for “status addiction”, that strikes me as a phrase of the same type as “water addiction”—denotationally correct, in the sense that no one seems able to give it up for any length of time, but connotationally objectionable, as it implies that we should be able to give it up, when it’s not clear that anyone could.
Maybe a more generous comparison would be “money addiction”. Status, I have argued, is a type of currency—something you regularly acquire and spend. If you’re canny enough, you can come out of these transactions with a “profit”, more than you started from. Everybody in modern western societies desires money, because it’s needed to do practically anything. Status works more or less the same way, and is in fact somewhat tradable with money.
That is a brilliant response to the little I wrote. Thanks! You’ve deconstructed my original question, while creating a few new related ones that may turn out more interesting when the day ends.
As Qiaochu_Yuan noted, it is easy to mistake more status anxiety verbalization for more status anxiety. As for the book Status Anxiety, it seems useful in that it discusses the status issues explicitly, but is sort of pop-psych in terms of offering untested solutions.
Are there either easy summaries of the book’s solutions, or would you mind mapping the difference between the video and the solutions proposed in the book?
I’d think that people on Lesswrong have relatively little status anxiety, and talk about it because it didn’t come naturally as they were growing up, but now see the use and power of it. Most people automatically fight for status, while we are relative pacifists, and didn’t even notice the bullets whizzing by our ears for most of our lives.
Yeah, good point!
Status pacifists is a very good descriptive name for the status immersion I see here.
Pacifists talk about war much more than your average person, that doesn’t make them bellicose.
I think in my case, and I wonder in how many others, I was being bombed and didn’t even know it. Didn’t understand it. Didn’t get it.
Didn’t connect the damage done to me or others with a benefit to the attacker. They were just a bomb throwing dick.
Robin Hanson has a scathing review of Alain de Botton’s book Status Anxiety. I don’t necessarily agree with all the parts of the review, but it is interesting nonetheless.
I agree slightly with Hanson’s points, but his tone is really off and I think he is slightly uncharitable to the book. It is firmly a pop-philosophy book, but Hanson treats it like it should have been a technical bit of social economics. Sigh. The philosopher’s last name is “de Botton,” but Hanson refers to him everywhere as “Botton” (excepting one unfortunate typo in the third paragraph). At the end of the review, Hanson decides to make some snide remarks at de Botton’s expense, which could have been dispensed without any loss.
Neglecting these points empties the review of most of its content.
Can anyone link me to a good summary of the book’s substantive content? The video is excessively long and slow.