I think there is one pattern that being good at something (socially accepted) is good signalling… but trying to improve at something (and thus showing that you think you are not good enough yet) is bad signalling.
I have noticed this pattern years ago, when I was trying to write sci-fi stories, and was meeting with other people who tried the same. I found somewhere on internet that many famous writers attended some kind of writer workshops. So I suggested to my friends that we should find out whether such workshop exists near us, and if not, try to create our own workshop. Most of them were horrified by that idea. When I asked why, they told me that a person either has a talent for writing, or not. The former cannot learn anything at workshops, because the true art cannot be taught; only the latter could learn to become a more skilled art-less graphomaniac. I thought such reasoning was stupid, and asked some literary critics about it: but they confirmed that they would percieve a person known to have attended such workshops as an art-less wannabe, because the true talent must be born. I refused to accept their reasoning too (because I have read a few autobiographies of famous writers, and many of them had some kind of writing education), but I have learned that admitting to a systematic self-improvement can be a huge status loss. (So a smart thing to do is to attend the workshops secretly, and to pretend you were just born with such ability; at least until your status becomes unshakeable.)
Shortly: to fix a problem, first you have to admit it. Admitting the problem = status loss.
Recently I was thinking about how exactly is this possible: how can improving your skills seem like a status loss? Like, is there any way to have good skills other than improving them? How else can the good-skilled people become good-skilled, if not by gradual learning? But then I realized that perhaps it’s the life-long learning aspect that goes against our instincts. In an ancient environment, life was short and rather simple—people learned their skills as children (naturally low-status), and as adults they have just used them; improving them further by using, but not starting from near-zero. Today, the life is so complex that we cannot learn everything as children, but our brains still see the first steps in mastering any skill as childish. We still feel learning is natural for children (skills learned in childhood we perceive as inborn), but retarded (literally: too late) for adults.
It’s not just improving your skills when you’re already an adult that’s a status loss. Nobody faults a top 100 professional tennis player for trying to get better, and in fact the commentators often lavish praise upon the most hard-working ones as being mature, ambitious, high-quality individuals.
It’s starting from ground zero that’s the problem. I learned this the hard way when I tried basketball. I started tennis from a young age, and spent my incompetent years as a child. With basketball though, I attempted playing it for the first time when I was already an adult, and it was a serious social shock.
I was used to being treated with respect on the tennis court, but none of the people I played basketball with knew who I was, or knew anything about me (because it was just at some large gym with a full basketball court and a ton of people who came to play). They didn’t just treat me like I was a newbie; they treated me like I deserved no respect at all (or rather many did—there were at least a few nice people).
As you said, it’s OK to be low status as a child (because they’re just naturally low status), but it gets socially intractable when you reach adulthood. We may literally be wired to “see the first steps in mastering any skill as childish”. I cringe when I imagine learning a new skill from the ground up and being watched and judged while doing so. This is certainly an area where our status hardware is dangerously mis-aligned for our current environment.
In the ancestral environment, one could imagine that it would have been counter-productive for an individual to decide to do a “career change”. Learning a new skill that didn’t have sufficient micro-skill carry-over from one’s old specialty to allow one to excel at a sufficiently adult-like level right away would have been a waste of one’s prior skill, and a detriment to the tribe. Perhaps it may have been optimal for the children to find their comparative advantage at a young age, and then simply stick to it.
It’s not just improving your skills when you’re already an adult that’s a status loss. Nobody faults a top 100 professional tennis player for trying to get better...
Yes, the exact rules are a bit more complex. Seems to me like it’s OK to practice if you already have much better results. The good results are high-status… and whetever else the person does is colored by the halo effect. If they work diligently, we should praise them for their work. But I guess that even if they would do nothing and yet deliver superior results, we should praise them for their talent. Whatever a cool person does, it automatically becomes cool, although the same thing might become uncool if someone else would do that (and the corresponding rationalization would be: no, it’s not really the same thing; you are doing it wrong).
On the other hand the image of “working hard” could be better than image of “just having luck” because it reduces envy. The envy-reducing factor could be also something else than hard work, for example “being crazy”. Something that says that these people are superior to the average Joe, but for some reason Joe probably wouldn’t want too much to be in their place. Or maybe this is not a counter-example to status loss… maybe it actually is a small status sacrifice designed to reduce the envy of the less successful people. Status games are complicated: if you get too much status, someone could get angry and kill you (either literally, or just work hard to ruin your carreer).
It could be interesting to find out whether top players get status loss among their peers if they practice visibly more than their peers but don’t deliver better results (yet).
And by the way, laughing at people who are trying to learn something also makes good sense as a zero-sum-game strategy. By threatening status loss you eliminate a future competition. If someone is already far ahead of you, it’s too late to stop them, but you can still stop people at your level from improving and leaving you behind. This sounds horrible, but it can be done unconsciously, like you really feel they don’t have a chance and are only making themselves funny, so you have to give them a helpful feedback.
Also there are some exceptional situations where adult learning from zero does not cause status loss. For example when the personal computers were new, older people did not lose status for learning the basics; they actually gained status even for minimum knowledge, because they were obviously superior in their age group.. and nobody expected them to really compete against 20-years olds (trying that seriously they would become very low-status).
Generally, if something is known to be new (not necessarily new technology, but also new fashion, for example Zumba dancing in my country), then even being a beginner increases your status among people who are at zero level. Probably because the zero level is percieved as average, so by being above-zero you automatically become elite.
Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in years (and I was never any good at it). I did very poorly. Small children zipped by me on the ice. It occurred to me that this situation could have been embarrassing, but I didn’t happen to feel embarrassed. I vaguely remember consciously editing out that reaction to that sort of situation, and think it was in response to my dad reacting badly to expressions of such embarrassment when I was years younger than I am now (maybe 12-15) but still older than others who would have been in beginner-classes-of-things I could have joined.
Interesting. It must be a nice cognitive situation to be in, or rather I guess I do remember what it was like. I spent many years almost utterly asocial and unaffected by what most people thought of me (at least in most ways), and it was certainly instrumental in allowing me to change life paths and develop new skills from the ground up, especially when it made me sacrifice a lot of perceived competence in the short term.
But since that time, or more specifically since I started being social again, this strategy has become defunct, and now I’ve re-acquired the standard, crippling fear of embarrassing myself in front of others. With anything I’m not already adult-level competent in, I have a hell of a time getting myself to go out there and not be afraid of screwing up and being judged by people.
This really sucks because there are at least a few things I’m unusually bad at that are highly important to me, and where the path to competence requires being around other people. I need to figure out a new way to avoid the fear of making mistakes, and specifically one that doesn’t require staying away from people (which is how I used to handle it).
Oddly, I feel slightly embarrassed when I’m reading a textbook printout (in English, which most Russians can’t read) during a commute, and it’s only undergraduate or first-year graduate level pure math, and not something more advanced...
Excellent comment. All of this is indeed, as some writer put it, “a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think”.
(Which extends to the fact that expressing either particular sadness or particular amusement at these everyday facts is in itself looked down upon, while it is a “sane” and “balanced” attitude that’s inconsistent. In other words, a naively rational response to the realities of our life and society is a one that would get you admitted to a hospital.)
That doesn’t seem to be the case where I am: I often hear “Have you been practicing? You’ve gotten much better than last time” in (what sounds to me like) a complimentary tone, whereas replying to “Where did you learn that?” with “I didn’t, I’m just improvising” is often met with (what looks to me like) disappointment/disenchantment. (EDIT: But I’m 25. What age did you have in mind as “adult?”
In your example people first notice you being better (that is high status) and only then become curious about the causes. My examples were about people noticing someone practicing, or just discussing a hypothetical practice in future, with no improvement yet. That’s not the same situation.
Simply said, you get −1 point for trying, +5 points for succeeding. Problem is that trying comes first, succeeding later. So there is that unpleasant phase of “already trying, not yet succeeding”, which you cannot avoid (though you can keep it secret). During this phase you have low status. Only later, when the success comes, your status becomes higher than it was originally.
The high-status answer to “Where did you learn that?” is “I am just naturally good at it”. Of course that works only if it is credible, which depends on the audience.
For example if I would try to get high status for my programming skills, to a totally computer-illiterate person I could say “I just naturally understand the computers; I was like this since my childhood”. No details necessary. To them, any computer skills are probably magic, accessible just for special kind of people, and I just confirmed the hypothesis.
To a fellow programmer I could say: “I played with computers since I was a child; then I participated in programming competitions and won them; then I studied university, which was rather easy for me; and now I just read some tutorial on the web or google a few examples, and I get it; anyway, most of the stuff is easy if you already know a lot”. I cannot pretend that one can learn programming magically without learning; but I can still move my magic more meta and pretend that it’s not my programming skills per se, but my learning-programming skills which are magical. Yes, I had to learn programming, but the learning was always easy and quick—I never failed, never got stuck, never had to ask another person for help, never doubted my success for a moment. (Which is psychologically almost as unlikely as being born with magical programming abilities, but I would expect an average programmer to believe this and to feel inferior compared to it.)
If I can take your answer literally, perhaps the word “improvising” had some bad vibe. It contains a possibility of failure, uncertainty. Also, trying is low status, but teaching institutions can have high status, so maybe people expected an answer like: “I had an internship at Google and that’s where I learned that”.
(Age is context-dependent. If you are 25 in a job, and you are youngest of your colleagues, they see you as a child.)
Yeah, probably that’s it. While I’m positive that among musicians just having a decent sense of rhythm and melody and improvising on the E flat minor pentatonic scale (AKA “only playing the black keys”) is lower status than having spent hundreds of hours taking piano lessons and rehearsing, I’m not at all sure whether it’d also be lower status among other people, and indeed now that I think about it, my model of non-musicians says it wouldn’t.
If I can take your answer literally,
I only normally use the word “improvising” about playing an instrument, or occasionally about vernacular dance (just discovered this term, BTW).
I think there is one pattern that being good at something (socially accepted) is good signalling… but trying to improve at something (and thus showing that you think you are not good enough yet) is bad signalling.
I have noticed this pattern years ago, when I was trying to write sci-fi stories, and was meeting with other people who tried the same. I found somewhere on internet that many famous writers attended some kind of writer workshops. So I suggested to my friends that we should find out whether such workshop exists near us, and if not, try to create our own workshop. Most of them were horrified by that idea. When I asked why, they told me that a person either has a talent for writing, or not. The former cannot learn anything at workshops, because the true art cannot be taught; only the latter could learn to become a more skilled art-less graphomaniac. I thought such reasoning was stupid, and asked some literary critics about it: but they confirmed that they would percieve a person known to have attended such workshops as an art-less wannabe, because the true talent must be born. I refused to accept their reasoning too (because I have read a few autobiographies of famous writers, and many of them had some kind of writing education), but I have learned that admitting to a systematic self-improvement can be a huge status loss. (So a smart thing to do is to attend the workshops secretly, and to pretend you were just born with such ability; at least until your status becomes unshakeable.)
Shortly: to fix a problem, first you have to admit it. Admitting the problem = status loss.
Recently I was thinking about how exactly is this possible: how can improving your skills seem like a status loss? Like, is there any way to have good skills other than improving them? How else can the good-skilled people become good-skilled, if not by gradual learning? But then I realized that perhaps it’s the life-long learning aspect that goes against our instincts. In an ancient environment, life was short and rather simple—people learned their skills as children (naturally low-status), and as adults they have just used them; improving them further by using, but not starting from near-zero. Today, the life is so complex that we cannot learn everything as children, but our brains still see the first steps in mastering any skill as childish. We still feel learning is natural for children (skills learned in childhood we perceive as inborn), but retarded (literally: too late) for adults.
Great comment.
It’s not just improving your skills when you’re already an adult that’s a status loss. Nobody faults a top 100 professional tennis player for trying to get better, and in fact the commentators often lavish praise upon the most hard-working ones as being mature, ambitious, high-quality individuals.
It’s starting from ground zero that’s the problem. I learned this the hard way when I tried basketball. I started tennis from a young age, and spent my incompetent years as a child. With basketball though, I attempted playing it for the first time when I was already an adult, and it was a serious social shock.
I was used to being treated with respect on the tennis court, but none of the people I played basketball with knew who I was, or knew anything about me (because it was just at some large gym with a full basketball court and a ton of people who came to play). They didn’t just treat me like I was a newbie; they treated me like I deserved no respect at all (or rather many did—there were at least a few nice people).
As you said, it’s OK to be low status as a child (because they’re just naturally low status), but it gets socially intractable when you reach adulthood. We may literally be wired to “see the first steps in mastering any skill as childish”. I cringe when I imagine learning a new skill from the ground up and being watched and judged while doing so. This is certainly an area where our status hardware is dangerously mis-aligned for our current environment.
In the ancestral environment, one could imagine that it would have been counter-productive for an individual to decide to do a “career change”. Learning a new skill that didn’t have sufficient micro-skill carry-over from one’s old specialty to allow one to excel at a sufficiently adult-like level right away would have been a waste of one’s prior skill, and a detriment to the tribe. Perhaps it may have been optimal for the children to find their comparative advantage at a young age, and then simply stick to it.
Yes, the exact rules are a bit more complex. Seems to me like it’s OK to practice if you already have much better results. The good results are high-status… and whetever else the person does is colored by the halo effect. If they work diligently, we should praise them for their work. But I guess that even if they would do nothing and yet deliver superior results, we should praise them for their talent. Whatever a cool person does, it automatically becomes cool, although the same thing might become uncool if someone else would do that (and the corresponding rationalization would be: no, it’s not really the same thing; you are doing it wrong).
On the other hand the image of “working hard” could be better than image of “just having luck” because it reduces envy. The envy-reducing factor could be also something else than hard work, for example “being crazy”. Something that says that these people are superior to the average Joe, but for some reason Joe probably wouldn’t want too much to be in their place. Or maybe this is not a counter-example to status loss… maybe it actually is a small status sacrifice designed to reduce the envy of the less successful people. Status games are complicated: if you get too much status, someone could get angry and kill you (either literally, or just work hard to ruin your carreer).
It could be interesting to find out whether top players get status loss among their peers if they practice visibly more than their peers but don’t deliver better results (yet).
And by the way, laughing at people who are trying to learn something also makes good sense as a zero-sum-game strategy. By threatening status loss you eliminate a future competition. If someone is already far ahead of you, it’s too late to stop them, but you can still stop people at your level from improving and leaving you behind. This sounds horrible, but it can be done unconsciously, like you really feel they don’t have a chance and are only making themselves funny, so you have to give them a helpful feedback.
Also there are some exceptional situations where adult learning from zero does not cause status loss. For example when the personal computers were new, older people did not lose status for learning the basics; they actually gained status even for minimum knowledge, because they were obviously superior in their age group.. and nobody expected them to really compete against 20-years olds (trying that seriously they would become very low-status).
Generally, if something is known to be new (not necessarily new technology, but also new fashion, for example Zumba dancing in my country), then even being a beginner increases your status among people who are at zero level. Probably because the zero level is percieved as average, so by being above-zero you automatically become elite.
Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in years (and I was never any good at it). I did very poorly. Small children zipped by me on the ice. It occurred to me that this situation could have been embarrassing, but I didn’t happen to feel embarrassed. I vaguely remember consciously editing out that reaction to that sort of situation, and think it was in response to my dad reacting badly to expressions of such embarrassment when I was years younger than I am now (maybe 12-15) but still older than others who would have been in beginner-classes-of-things I could have joined.
Interesting. It must be a nice cognitive situation to be in, or rather I guess I do remember what it was like. I spent many years almost utterly asocial and unaffected by what most people thought of me (at least in most ways), and it was certainly instrumental in allowing me to change life paths and develop new skills from the ground up, especially when it made me sacrifice a lot of perceived competence in the short term.
But since that time, or more specifically since I started being social again, this strategy has become defunct, and now I’ve re-acquired the standard, crippling fear of embarrassing myself in front of others. With anything I’m not already adult-level competent in, I have a hell of a time getting myself to go out there and not be afraid of screwing up and being judged by people.
This really sucks because there are at least a few things I’m unusually bad at that are highly important to me, and where the path to competence requires being around other people. I need to figure out a new way to avoid the fear of making mistakes, and specifically one that doesn’t require staying away from people (which is how I used to handle it).
Oddly, I feel slightly embarrassed when I’m reading a textbook printout (in English, which most Russians can’t read) during a commute, and it’s only undergraduate or first-year graduate level pure math, and not something more advanced...
Excellent comment. All of this is indeed, as some writer put it, “a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think”.
(Which extends to the fact that expressing either particular sadness or particular amusement at these everyday facts is in itself looked down upon, while it is a “sane” and “balanced” attitude that’s inconsistent. In other words, a naively rational response to the realities of our life and society is a one that would get you admitted to a hospital.)
That doesn’t seem to be the case where I am: I often hear “Have you been practicing? You’ve gotten much better than last time” in (what sounds to me like) a complimentary tone, whereas replying to “Where did you learn that?” with “I didn’t, I’m just improvising” is often met with (what looks to me like) disappointment/disenchantment. (EDIT: But I’m 25. What age did you have in mind as “adult?”
In your example people first notice you being better (that is high status) and only then become curious about the causes. My examples were about people noticing someone practicing, or just discussing a hypothetical practice in future, with no improvement yet. That’s not the same situation.
Simply said, you get −1 point for trying, +5 points for succeeding. Problem is that trying comes first, succeeding later. So there is that unpleasant phase of “already trying, not yet succeeding”, which you cannot avoid (though you can keep it secret). During this phase you have low status. Only later, when the success comes, your status becomes higher than it was originally.
The high-status answer to “Where did you learn that?” is “I am just naturally good at it”. Of course that works only if it is credible, which depends on the audience.
For example if I would try to get high status for my programming skills, to a totally computer-illiterate person I could say “I just naturally understand the computers; I was like this since my childhood”. No details necessary. To them, any computer skills are probably magic, accessible just for special kind of people, and I just confirmed the hypothesis.
To a fellow programmer I could say: “I played with computers since I was a child; then I participated in programming competitions and won them; then I studied university, which was rather easy for me; and now I just read some tutorial on the web or google a few examples, and I get it; anyway, most of the stuff is easy if you already know a lot”. I cannot pretend that one can learn programming magically without learning; but I can still move my magic more meta and pretend that it’s not my programming skills per se, but my learning-programming skills which are magical. Yes, I had to learn programming, but the learning was always easy and quick—I never failed, never got stuck, never had to ask another person for help, never doubted my success for a moment. (Which is psychologically almost as unlikely as being born with magical programming abilities, but I would expect an average programmer to believe this and to feel inferior compared to it.)
If I can take your answer literally, perhaps the word “improvising” had some bad vibe. It contains a possibility of failure, uncertainty. Also, trying is low status, but teaching institutions can have high status, so maybe people expected an answer like: “I had an internship at Google and that’s where I learned that”.
(Age is context-dependent. If you are 25 in a job, and you are youngest of your colleagues, they see you as a child.)
Yeah, probably that’s it. While I’m positive that among musicians just having a decent sense of rhythm and melody and improvising on the E flat minor pentatonic scale (AKA “only playing the black keys”) is lower status than having spent hundreds of hours taking piano lessons and rehearsing, I’m not at all sure whether it’d also be lower status among other people, and indeed now that I think about it, my model of non-musicians says it wouldn’t.
I only normally use the word “improvising” about playing an instrument, or occasionally about vernacular dance (just discovered this term, BTW).
Not where I am. ISTM that here, being better than you used to be until recently is received pretty favourably.