If you want to unpack “social position”, “relative ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” is a much more plausible candidate.
You wrote:
You can define status as “how much more ability to be treated favorably you have compared to other people,” but I don’t think that’s a useful definition. The word “status” has gain popularity particularly because it flexibly describes a wide array of social interactions.
You don’t think it is a useful definition? (!) I could see an argument being made that it is less useful than ‘absolute ability to be treated favorably’ but how is it not useful at all? Even if it is more useful (and I’m not at all convinced a concept becomes more useful because it is broader) is that a reason to use it despite it straightforwardly contradicting the meaning usual English word (see all the instances of ‘rank’ and ‘relative’ in the above definitions). I guess this has become a definition debate which is obviously silly but as far as I can tell your definition just doesn’t match the way the word is used at all.
If you want to unpack “social position”, “relative ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” is a much more plausible candidate.
Given two perfect strangers in a post apocalyptic scenario, and two perfect strangers who soon realize they are both high ranking members of their respective tribes, I think the latter group will show more respect for each other, even though they have no one else to compare themselves to. (I will note that this is an empirical prediction which might be false. Anyone know if data exists on this?)
You don’t think it is a useful definition? (!) I could see an argument being made that it is less useful than ‘absolute ability to be treated favorably’ but how is it not useful at all?
I mostly agree with this, and should have worded it that way.
I think we need a word for each of these concepts. I’m not picky about which word gets used to mean what. But I still don’t think it’s automatically implied that status is relative by the traditional definition (“position” can be on an absolute or relative scale) but the word status gets used on Less Wrong in enough contexts that for our purposes, it’s probably more useful as the broader term.
Edit: Using status as the broad term also saves us the trouble of coming up with a new word, since we just say “relative status” whenever we mean that, and if we’re in a discussion that’s obviously about relative status it can probably be abbreviated anyway.
Given two perfect strangers in a post apocalyptic scenario, and two perfect strangers who soon realize they are both high ranking members of their respective tribes, I think the latter group will show more respect for each other, even though they have no one else to compare themselves to.
The strangers have more social power to mistreat the other without repercussions than the chiefs have.
I think we need a word for each of these concepts.
Disentangle ability to be treated favorably from relative social position. If every one of some nations has nuclear weapons sufficient for a MAD policy, we can expect them to not mistreat each other too harshly. If this is a post-apocalyptic scenario and each such nation was populated by robots and one human, in a meeting of the humans none would be necessarily be high status, but severe social harm would not be inflictable.
In a group of thousands of otherwise equal sadists with locked-in syndrome in which each could activate a shock collar on a random other sadist with their eyes, one wouldn’t say they are all low status.
That is really a grim hypothetical and I hope to think of a better one.
Also, I didn’t say that all status was absolute. Relative status definitely exists, and contributes more directly to the ability to mistreatment. I was simply disagreeing with the idea that status is relative all the time, either by definition or by example.
If you want to unpack “social position”, “relative ability to be treated favorably by people in your tribe” is a much more plausible candidate.
You wrote:
You don’t think it is a useful definition? (!) I could see an argument being made that it is less useful than ‘absolute ability to be treated favorably’ but how is it not useful at all? Even if it is more useful (and I’m not at all convinced a concept becomes more useful because it is broader) is that a reason to use it despite it straightforwardly contradicting the meaning usual English word (see all the instances of ‘rank’ and ‘relative’ in the above definitions). I guess this has become a definition debate which is obviously silly but as far as I can tell your definition just doesn’t match the way the word is used at all.
Given two perfect strangers in a post apocalyptic scenario, and two perfect strangers who soon realize they are both high ranking members of their respective tribes, I think the latter group will show more respect for each other, even though they have no one else to compare themselves to. (I will note that this is an empirical prediction which might be false. Anyone know if data exists on this?)
I mostly agree with this, and should have worded it that way.
I think we need a word for each of these concepts. I’m not picky about which word gets used to mean what. But I still don’t think it’s automatically implied that status is relative by the traditional definition (“position” can be on an absolute or relative scale) but the word status gets used on Less Wrong in enough contexts that for our purposes, it’s probably more useful as the broader term.
Edit: Using status as the broad term also saves us the trouble of coming up with a new word, since we just say “relative status” whenever we mean that, and if we’re in a discussion that’s obviously about relative status it can probably be abbreviated anyway.
The strangers have more social power to mistreat the other without repercussions than the chiefs have.
Disentangle ability to be treated favorably from relative social position. If every one of some nations has nuclear weapons sufficient for a MAD policy, we can expect them to not mistreat each other too harshly. If this is a post-apocalyptic scenario and each such nation was populated by robots and one human, in a meeting of the humans none would be necessarily be high status, but severe social harm would not be inflictable.
In a group of thousands of otherwise equal sadists with locked-in syndrome in which each could activate a shock collar on a random other sadist with their eyes, one wouldn’t say they are all low status.
That is really a grim hypothetical and I hope to think of a better one.
Also, I didn’t say that all status was absolute. Relative status definitely exists, and contributes more directly to the ability to mistreatment. I was simply disagreeing with the idea that status is relative all the time, either by definition or by example.