When people talk about status seeking they can mean either boring idea, that it’s one of the motivations people have and some people are more obsessed with status than others, or new and exciting idea that all human behaviour is essentially status seeking. I agree that the boring idea of status seeking has its predictive power. What I wanted to talk about, and I’m sorry that I failed to specify it good enough, is that the new and exciting idea of status seeking just gives mysterious answer while trying to look as if it’s the same idea. And their conflation is where the problems come from.
There is this whole framework of looking at human behaviour from the status seeking perspective and seeing only status games. Something akin always searching for highter simulacrum level meaning of a statement. It’s not immediately clear that using it is a bad idea. After all people do seem to seek status. And people who believe there is a lion on the other side of the river do tend not to want to go there, and tend to be part of not-going-accross-the-river group. But applying this framework ruins our ability to talk about objective level questions and this is a problem.
When people talk about status seeking they can mean either boring idea, that it’s one of the motivations people have and some people are more obsessed with status than others, or new and exciting idea that all human behaviour is essentially status seeking. I agree that the boring idea of status seeking has its predictive power. What I wanted to talk about, and I’m sorry that I failed to specify it good enough, is that the new and exciting idea of status seeking just gives mysterious answer while trying to look as if it’s the same idea. And their conflation is where the problems come from.
There is this whole framework of looking at human behaviour from the status seeking perspective and seeing only status games. Something akin always searching for highter simulacrum level meaning of a statement. It’s not immediately clear that using it is a bad idea. After all people do seem to seek status. And people who believe there is a lion on the other side of the river do tend not to want to go there, and tend to be part of not-going-accross-the-river group. But applying this framework ruins our ability to talk about objective level questions and this is a problem.