What if "status" IS a terminal value for most people?

I don't know what to make of this. It means everything I'd pieced together about people is utterly, utterly wrong, because it assumed that they all valued truth, and understanding - the pursuits of intelligence when you don't have the political trait.

"Truth" and "understanding" seem to work as applause lights in this sentence. "Status" is used to the opposite effect throughout the post.

I think you're premise is a little confused. It sounds like you previously viewed status-seeking as the emotional equivalent of immoral, but now you don't because you realize it has adaptational advantages. I find it strange that you feel evolutionary causation is adequate to justify something, but I guess I won't question that.

More to the point, I think you're misjudging status. Status isn't as simple Machiavellian plays for power. It's generally assumed that only sociopaths play for dominance in and of itself. The term "status" feels kinda dirty when you analyze human interaction from afar. There's always the subtext that if you play for it, you're a bad person. That's not the way it feels when you're actually talking to other people.

Seeking status can feel like trying to live up to the expectations of people you care about. It can feel like trying to stand on equal ground with your friends. It can feel like trying be comfortable talking to that girl at the grocery store.

When people look at status seeking under a microscope, they usually try to screen off the humanity of its experience and so it comes off as something a super villain would do. When you actually feel it, it feels right. It feels very human. If you interact with other people at all, I can almost (not quite) guarantee that you seek status, you just don't call it status.

I don't have this trait. I don't value status in and of itself. It's useful, because it lets me do other things. It opens doors. So I invest in still having status, but status is not a goal; Status is to me, as a fork is to hunger - merely a means to an end.

Are you certain of this? Don't get me wrong it seems possible. But that paragraph will be seen by many people as a grab for status in the LessWrong community.

Try replacing the word "status" with the word "respect" in this post.

How do you gain knowledge of other people's terminal values, or even your own?

I don't believe status is my terminal value. I don't think it's a value at all. I think it's a useful umbrella term for all the lower level optimization processes that the blind idiot god decided to throw in.

Do you not value praise or criticism? Do you not care if you're useful to others? Do you not care if you get to delegate instead of DIY? Do you not care if you get to choose your sexual partners? Etc...

I cautiously suggest some of these hint at the actual terminal values under the umbrella.

I wish I could say that I don't value status. But whom would I be kidding. It gives me warm fuzzies when people I value appreciate and respect me. My guess is that this trait is mostly innate, rather then acquired.

I think politics is a good word here, because status and politics are not quite the same.

It was apparent to me long ago that there was a social competition going on, much of which I had no interest in and found annoying, but I've seen that it has effects on me that I shouldn't ignore. It's a zero sum social war, but the bullets are real.

I'd rather spend time with people who competed for status by production of some good or excellence in truth, as opposed to disinformation and in group jockeying used to tear people down. How do I better arrange that?

It means everything I'd pieced together about people is utterly, utterly wrong, because it assumed that they all valued truth, and understanding - the pursuits of intelligence when you don't have the political trait.

No, people don't all value that. And the news gets worse - it appears to me that people who believe in epistemic truth lose to people who believe in social truth; that not surprisingly, people who believe in social truth have a social advantage.

Status perceptions are tricksy things

It seems to me that a lot of people read status moves into just about every action. The way that a lot of people define it is not to define it at all - everything becomes connected with status. If you behave in just about any way at all, it will be perceived as desired or undesired, and that gets added into the status evaluation. The way some people use it, it's like they're trying to create the ultimate hasty generalization.

Considering the all-encompassing nature of status perceptions, I don't see a way to invalidate them, so I hope that anyone reading status into this discussion post is thinking "If I can't think of a way to invalidate my perceptions through testing, might my perceptions of status-seeking work exactly like the Barnum effect - I paint status seeking perceptions with such a wide brush that everybody qualifies as status-seeking by my definition?"

If you claim not to be motivated by status, you will have difficulty finding anything to say or do that escapes other's status evaluations for that reason.

There are incentives, as well, for others to read status moves into your actions. If most of the group is evaluating your status, and someone is competing with you for status, this someone has to alter the group's opinions of their own status relative to yours. Failing to evaluate your status would leave them at a disadvantage. More importantly, not believing that you're actively seeking status would put them at a further disadvantage by preventing them from trying to predict what status moves you will make next.

How should status be defined?

Pitfalls of status perceptions:

I see a lot of people making the kinds of mistakes that are described in 37 ways words can be wrong:

5 The act of labeling something with a word, disguises a challengable inductive inference you are making.

8 Your verbal definition doesn't capture more than a tiny fraction of the category's shared characteristics, but you try to reason as if it does.

11 You ask whether something "is" or "is not" a category member but can't name the question you really want answered.

12 You treat intuitively perceived hierarchical categories like the only correct way to parse the world, without realizing that other forms of statistical inference are possible even though your brain doesn't use them.

13 You talk about categories as if they are manna fallen from the Platonic Realm

23 The existence of a neat little word prevents you from seeing the details of the thing you're trying to think about.

24 You have only one word, but there are two or more different things-in-reality, so that all the facts about them get dumped into a single undifferentiated mental bucket.

I do not see a way to create and use status perceptions that doesn't qualify as a logical fallacy, bias or "way that words can be wrong". This is the reason why I say "I don't believe in status." It's not that I don't think other people are creating status perceptions. It's that I think the status perceptions they create are irrational.

How I evaluate others without status perceptions:

I think an easier question to address in public than "Do I care about my own status?" is "Do I make status evaluations of others?" and this is relevant because if you don't care about status, you theoretically shouldn't evaluate others that way, either. Here is how I evaluate people without using status:

People are systems and they're out there interacting in a system. They are not just little bundles of traits, so it makes no sense to me to lump all of these traits together into a status evaluation (committing mistakes #5, #8 and/or #24) and rank everyone in a hierarchical organization scheme (committing mistake #12). If I want a person in my life for some purpose (lover, friend, etc.) my question is not "Which options are high status?" but "What interactions do I want to have with the chosen person and which specific traits are necessary for that?" (Avoiding mistake #11).

Essentially, I create specific questions to answer, break my perceptions down into component parts and consider how the traits of the person will play out in context in terms of cause and effect. This is the only way to get the specifics of my social needs fulfilled and it helps me avoid the halo effect.

Ranking people by status looks about as useful to me as guessing the teacher's password is for answering questions about how things work.

Understanding the cause and effect is also how I go about understanding myself. Other people's perceptions of me have little to no influence on my ideas about myself because my ideas about myself are far more complex and detailed than theirs are. This is how I ended up caring so little about what others think of me.

It means everything I'd pieced together about people is utterly, utterly wrong, because it assumed that they all valued truth, and understanding

Can't a person value status and truth and understanding?

Speaking from a male perspective, I view status as an instrumental value for sex. You say in the comment below (above?) that a terminal value is so when you trade other values for it: do you see often men exchanging sex for status? I think status remains an instrumental value because underneath every calculation there's the question: "If I do this, I'll have access to more females". Also I'm not surprised that as a female you're not concerned with status (besides some very rare alpha females, aka queen bees, females don't). So:
a) I don't value status --> meh, not surprising said from a female human (which usually competes for attention, not status)
b) other people do value status terminally --> I doubt it, I think status is instrumental for sex
c) I assumed they all value truth and understanding --> Haha, I pity you :p

Phil Goetz had a nice post about how status makes FAI difficult:

Now imagine two friendly AIs, one non-positional and one positional.

The non-positional FAI has a tough task. It wants to give everyone what it imagines they want.

But the positional FAI has an impossible task. It wants to give everyone what it is that it thinks they value, which is to be considered better than other people, or at least better than other people of the same sex. But it's a zero-sum value.

H: Person x has no desire for status

E: Person x writes a post about how she's unlike most other people.

You already assigned P(H) as 0.1 (or quite possibly lower). Now you only need to estimate P(E|H) and P(E|~H), plug it all into Bayes rule, and you'll see why people are not really buying it. It doesn't mean you're wrong - it's just unlikely that you're right.

The word "status" needs some disambiguation here. A person's status is (A) the amount of power they have, (B) the level of accomplishment and skill they have, (C) other peoples' perceptions of A and B, (D) their own perception of A-C, and (E) the signals they give off based on D. People execute adaptations that optimize C, by controlling D and E, but it's not as straightforward as trying to maximize it; in a more primitive society, that would just get you killed.

Taking an acting class may do interesting things to the way you value status. Based on my limited experience, having everyone in the class play low and high status roles can create a highly compassionate, cooperative, and egalitarian environment.

Actually, what you may wonder is whether utility of increased status just has a complex shape for you.

For example, I can imagine some situation of having too little status, but in most cases I get what is enough personally for me before even trying.

Hm. I know that the biological term may not be quite right here (although the brain is biological, scaling this idea up may be problematic) but I have wondered if certain psychological traits are not epigenetic: that is, it isn't that you are some strange mutant if you express terminal value X strongly and someone else expresses it weakly. Rather, that our brain structures lead to a certain common set of shared values but that different environmental conditions lead to those values being expressed in a stronger or weaker sense.

So, for instance, if "status" (however that cashes out here) is highly important instrumentally in ones younger years, the brain develops that into a terminal value. If "intelligence" (again, cashing that out will be important) is highly important instrumentally in younger years, than it develops into a terminal value. It isn't that anyone else is a horrible mutant, we probably all share values, but those values may conflict and so it may matter which traits we express more strongly. Of course, if it is anything like an epigentic phenomenon then there may be some very complicated factors to consider.

Possible falsifiers for this: if environment, particularly social environment (although evolution is dumb and it could be some mechanism that just correlates highly) in formative years does not correlate highly with terminal values later in life. If people actually do seem to share a set of values with relatively equal strength. If terminal values are often modified strongly after the majority of brain development has ceased. If some terminal values do not correlate with some instrumental value, but nevertheless vary strongly between individuals.

I think that status probably acts like a terminal goal in my decision making (status is an abstraction, I know). I've mostly gotten over feeling that is a bad thing. It's just another need I have to satisfy, and being aware of it as a distinct value really helps to optimize getting it and helps with not compromising other goals when I am pursuing it.

What would evidence for or against 'people in general view status as a terminal goal' look like?

When we hear of people seeking status, we recall the consequences of pursuit of status (loneliness, strife), rather than what status itself causes for the people who achieve it (freedom, sense of having done something important). Since the action of imagining that status could mean the latter is made impossible due to awareness of the former, the feeling of lostness arises, from a lack of a reference point to empathize with the feelings of others that believe these things.

I don't know what to make of this. It means everything I'd pieced together about people is utterly, utterly wrong, because it assumed that they all valued truth, and understanding - the pursuits of intelligence when you don't have the political trait.

Literal emotional reactions are assigned to situations and concepts all the time, but ultimately, every person on Earth just wants to feel at rest, with the awareness that nothing bad is happening and the awareness of opportunities and/or warmth around them. Therefore, everyone (that means yourself and myself!) seeks truth and understanding, it's just that the very words "truth" and "understanding" are assigned different emotional reactions, and so are given different priorities based on the life situation of the people being queried of these concepts.

Therefore the most one can say about people is not that they don't seek truth or understanding, but rather, they've chosen a different means to get to the place that truth or understanding lead to.

If I may ask, is this line of thinking limited or global in emotional significance?

Well, why are you sharing this discovery? What makes you present yourself in positive light as thinking outwards, even though that distracts from the point you're trying to make? Yes, indeed, the status may be a terminal value for most people, and furthermore, what if most people are unaware of that?