A thing that I often see happening when people talk about “normie-legible status systems” is that they gaslight themselves into believing that some status system that is extraordinarily legible, or they are part of, is something that is consensus.
Academia is the most intense example of this. Most people don’t care that much about academic status! This also happens in the other direction. Youtube is a major source of status in much of the world, especially among young people, but is considered low-brow whenever people argue about this, and so people dismiss it.
I also think people tend to do a fallacy of gray thing where if a status system is not maximally legible (like writing popular blogposts, or running a popular podcast, or making popular Youtube videos, or being popular on Twitter), they dismiss the status system as not real and “illegible”.
I think modeling the real status and reputation systems that are present in the world is important, but for example, trying to ascent the academic status hierarchy is a bad use of time and resources. It’s extremely competitive, and not actually that influential outside of the academic bubble. It is in some fields better correlated with actual skills and integrity and intelligence, and so I still think a reasonable thing to consider, but I think most people are better placed to trade off a bit of legibility against a whole amount of net realness in status (this importantly does not mean your LW quick takes will be the thing that causes you to become world-renowned, I am not saying “just say smart things and the world will recognize you”, I am saying “don’t think that only the most legible status systems, or the one with the most mobs hunting dissenters from the status system are the only real ways of gaining recognition in the world”).
sure, the thing you’re looking for is the status system that jointly optimizes for alignedness with what you care about, and how legible it is to the people you are trying to convince.
(My guess is you meant to agree with that, but kind of the whole point of my comment was that the dimension that is more important than legibility and alignment with you is the buy-in your audience has for a given status system. Youtube is not very legible, and not that aligned, but for some audiences has very high buy-in.)
but for example, trying to ascent the academic status hierarchy is a bad use of time and resources
For some fields such as biotech, it’s difficult to get access to labs outside of academia. And you can’t learn without lab access because the cutting edge experiments don’t get posted to YouTube (yet).
A thing that I often see happening when people talk about “normie-legible status systems” is that they gaslight themselves into believing that some status system that is extraordinarily legible, or they are part of, is something that is consensus.
Academia is the most intense example of this. Most people don’t care that much about academic status! This also happens in the other direction. Youtube is a major source of status in much of the world, especially among young people, but is considered low-brow whenever people argue about this, and so people dismiss it.
I also think people tend to do a fallacy of gray thing where if a status system is not maximally legible (like writing popular blogposts, or running a popular podcast, or making popular Youtube videos, or being popular on Twitter), they dismiss the status system as not real and “illegible”.
I think modeling the real status and reputation systems that are present in the world is important, but for example, trying to ascent the academic status hierarchy is a bad use of time and resources. It’s extremely competitive, and not actually that influential outside of the academic bubble. It is in some fields better correlated with actual skills and integrity and intelligence, and so I still think a reasonable thing to consider, but I think most people are better placed to trade off a bit of legibility against a whole amount of net realness in status (this importantly does not mean your LW quick takes will be the thing that causes you to become world-renowned, I am not saying “just say smart things and the world will recognize you”, I am saying “don’t think that only the most legible status systems, or the one with the most mobs hunting dissenters from the status system are the only real ways of gaining recognition in the world”).
sure, the thing you’re looking for is the status system that jointly optimizes for alignedness with what you care about, and how legible it is to the people you are trying to convince.
(My guess is you meant to agree with that, but kind of the whole point of my comment was that the dimension that is more important than legibility and alignment with you is the buy-in your audience has for a given status system. Youtube is not very legible, and not that aligned, but for some audiences has very high buy-in.)
For some fields such as biotech, it’s difficult to get access to labs outside of academia. And you can’t learn without lab access because the cutting edge experiments don’t get posted to YouTube (yet).