Open Thread: September 2011

I hope you don't mind, I've copied your message to the New Cryonet mailing list. This is an important issue for the cryonics community to discuss. I think there needs to be a system in place for collecting donations and/or interest to pay for equal access for those who can't get life insurance. There are a couple of cases I'm aware of where the community raised enough donations to cover uninsurable individuals for CI suspensions.

I'm both transgendered and diagnosed with depression, and I've had good luck getting insured via Rudi Hoffman. I don't recall what the name of the insurance company was, and I haven't heard the final OK since the medical examination, but I don't foresee any difficulties. I was warned they'll most likely put me down on male rates (feh) despite being legally female, but I can deal with that even if I don't like it.

If you don't mind me asking - how old are you and how much money do you typically save a year?

What I don't see is a lot of people who'd like to and can't, particularly for reasons of discrimination.

Are you saying you disagree with the probability estimates of insurance companies regarding the of death of transgendered people with a history of depression for a given year (or did you mean something else)? I'm willing to consider any arguments you have for that proposition, but, as far as I know, the SPRs used by insurance companies are the gold standard of instrumental rationality, so there is a strong presumption that they are (more) correct and that you (or any human expert for that matter) are (more) wrong.

I... that's... I don't...

...

I'll be in my bunk.

They have gone too far.

Please please please someone translate it into English ! Or Russian, I'm not picky... I must read this manga, if only to see whether the text... disturbs... me as much as the art does.

At first I thought "Oh, nice, I'll finally know what Christians felt when that horrible Manga Gospel got published", but then I clicked the link and I just couldn't help having a good laugh. It seems I can only simulate the more chill Christians.

On further reflection, I got my start on literature through multiple shelves full of comic book adaptations of the classics, so I really shouldn't feel superior. Although to be fair those were a little more faithful to the source material - except for Taras Bulba, which quite shocked me later when I got my hands on the non-bowdlerised version.

That picture of Spinoza displeases me on so many levels.

We don't optimize for well-being, we optimize for what we (think we) want, which are two very different things.

Natural selection does not cease operation. Say, for example, that someone invents a box that fully reproduces in every respect the subjective experience of eating and of having eaten by directly stimulating the brain. Dieters would love this device. Here's a device that implements in extreme form the very danger that you fear. In this case, the specific danger is that you will stop eating and die.

So the question is, will the device wipe out the human race? Almost certainly it will not wipe out the entire human race, simply because there are enough people around who would nevertheless choose to eat despite the availability of the device, possibly because they make a conscious decision to do so. These people will be the survivors, and they will reproduce, and their children will have both their values (transmitted culturally) and their genes, and so will probably be particularly resistant to the device.

That's an extreme case. In the actual case, there are doubtless many people who are not adapting well to technological change. They will tend to die out disproportionately, will tend to reproduce disproportionately less.

We have a model of this future in today's addictive drugs. Some people are more resistant to the lure of addictive drugs than others. Some people's lives are destroyed as they pursue the unnatural bliss of drugs, but many people manage to avoid their fate.

Many people have so far managed the trick of pursuing super stimuli without destroying their lives in the process.

.

We don't optimize for well-being, we optimize for what we (think we) want, which are two very different things. (And often, even calling it "optimization" is a stretch.)

You think we optimize for what we think we want? That's a stretch in itself. ;)

(Totally agree with what you are saying!)

I, on the contrary, remain a techno optimist, even more so.

It's a kind of sad, that so many clever people here are losing their confidence into the techno progress. Well, maybe not sad, but it certainly means, that they are not onto something big themselves.

Please Upvote this if you think I should write a discussion level post.

Why not just do a draft in discussion? It's a top level subject, but how could we judge well at this point without knowing what the post would look like?

If you think I shouldn't post about it at all, please upvote this. Be sure to downvote below.

If you voted, please downvote here to karma-balance.

You can do it. It's good countersignaling. But you have to be absurdly careful about writing quality. It's your job to convey to a skeptical audience that fanfiction can be transformative. You have to be absolutely brutal in avoiding language that signals immaturity -- or, better, find an editor who can be absolutely brutal to you.

My M.O., back in my college-essay days, was to read a New Yorker before sitting down to write. Inhale the style. Better yet, find some essays by Gene Weingarten, the modern master of long-form narrative journalism. Imagine what Gene Weingarten could do with HP:MOR. Then try to do it.

In general, honesty is the best policy. If you really were influenced to great things by HJPEV, explain it well and it should go over well. If the admissions folks are going to say "This well-written and inspiring essay is about fanfiction" and thus throw it in the garbage, it could just as well have been thrown away for the room's lighting or what they had for breakfast.

Hmm... I'm not sure. I'd take the word of someone with experience on an admissions committee, if you can get it.

If you do it, I think you'd be better off talking just a little about the character and much more about the community you found. Writing to the prompt is not really important for this sort of thing. (Usually one of the prompts is pretty much "Other," confirming that.)

What's your second choice?

Hmm. I was a little tired and rushed when I wrote this. There are a few thoughts I'd like to add concerning historiography.

As I said above, history, because of its subjective nature, is always influenced by the historian's bias. Historiography could maybe be called the study of these biases, but is in itself subject to the same flaws.

No historian's viewpoint on a historical event will be fully objective. But just because no approach can be perfect, does not mean that all approaches can be equally imperfect. My question isn't so much about how to be a rational historian, but more: is there a rational way to evaluate the relative worths of different historical viewpoints?

Past-you, using the evidence that past-you had, came to a particular conclusion. Present-you, using more evidence, may come to a different conclusion. Future-you, using still more evidence, may come to yet another conclusion. This is as it should be; that's what evidence is for.

I don't know why I clicked on this link, but the video is pretty funny. I feel like its a parody, mostly because everyone fits their stereotypical role so well.

...Upon reading the bottom of the page, yeah its a parody.

You don't need to reject CCC without reductionism to defeat his argument. His argument is "If CCC is true, reductionism is false"

That's not a reason to reject reductionism, unless you have better reason to hold to CCC than to reductionism.

From the perspective of the Copenhagen interpretation, this is like a debate about whether 'consciousness updates the prior', in which 'the prior' is treated as a physical entity which exists independently of observers and their ignorance.

In the Copenhagen interpretation - at least as originally intended! - a wavefunction is not a physical state. It is instead like a probability distribution.

From this perspective, the mystery of quantum mechanics is not, why do wavefunctions collapse? It is, why do wavefunctions work, and what is the physical reality behind them?

The reification of wavefunctions has apparently become an invisible background assumption to a lot of people. But in the Copenhagen interpretation, wavefunctions do not exist, only "observables" exist: the quantities whose behavior the wavefunction helps you to predict.

Examples of observables are: the position of an electron; the rate of change of a field; the spin of a photon. In the Copenhagen interpretation, these are what exists.

Some examples of things which are not observables and which do not exist: An electron wavefunction with a peak here and a peak there; a photon in a superposition of spin states; in fact, any superposition.

Because quantum mechanics does not offer a nonprobabilistic deeper level of description, it is very easy for people to speak and think as if the wavefunctions are the physical realities, but that is not how Copenhagen is supposed to work.

To reiterate: "consciousness collapses the wavefunction" in exactly the same sense that "consciousness updates the prior". You are free to invent subquantum physical theories in which wavefunctions are real, in an attempt to explain why quantum mechanics works, and maybe in those theories you want to have something "collapsing" wavefunctions, but you probably wouldn't want that to be "consciousness".

Perhaps that extremely simple systems, that no one would consider conscious, can also "cause collapse"? It doesn't take much: just entangle the superposed state with another particle - then when you measure, canceling can't occur and you perceive a randomly collapsed wavefunction. The important thing is the entangling, not the fact that you're conscious: measuring a superposed state (i.e. entangling your mind with it) will do the trick, but it's entirely unnecessary.

I used to believe the consciousness-causes-collapse idea, and it was quite a relief when I realized it doesn't work like that.

I wouldn't call occam's razor an explicit part of reductionism. It's basically equivalent to saying you can't just make up information.

I've been debating the validity of reductionism with a friend for a while [...] Does anyone know an explanation of reasons to reject consciousness-causes-collapse that isn't explicitly predicated on reductionism?

This quite possibly can't be done. If you handicap yourself by refusing to use an idea while examining its merits, you may well draw inferior conclusions about it, and modify it in a way that makes it worse. You should use your whole mind to reflect on itself (unless you conclude some of its parts are not to be trusted). See these posts in particular:

• The Lens That Sees Its Flaws
• Occam's Razor
• A Priori
• Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
• Which Parts Are "Me"?

There are a variety of different issues.

First, it assumes that consciousness exists as an ontological unit. This isn't just a problem with reductionism but is a problem with Occam's razor. What precisely one means by reductionism can be complicated and subtle with some versions more definite or plausible than others. But regardless, there's no good evidence that consciousness is an irreducible.

Second, it raises serious questions about what things were like before there were conscious entities. If no collapse occurred prior to conscious entities what does that say about the early universe and how it functioned? Note that this actually raises potentially testable claims if one can use telescopes to look back before the dawn of life. Unfortunately, I've never seen any consciousness causes collapse proponent either explain why this doesn't lead to any observable difference or make any plausible claim about what differences one would observe.

Third, it violates a general metapattern of history. As things have progressed the pattern has consistently been that minds don't interact with the laws of physics in any fundamental way and that more and more ideas about how minds might interact have been thrown out (ETA: There are a few notable exceptions such as some of the stuff involving the placebo effect.). We've spent much of the last few hundred years establishing stronger and stronger versions of this claim. Thus, as a simple matter of induction, one would expect that trend if anything to continue. (I don't know how much inducting on the pattern of discoveries is justified.)

Fourth, it is ill-defined. What constitutes a conscious mind? Presumably people are conscious. Are severely mentally challenged people conscious? Are the non-human great apes conscious? Are ravens and other corvids conscious? Are dogs or cats conscious? Are mice conscious? Etc. down to single celled organisms and viruses.

Fifth, consciousness causes collapse is a hypothesis that is easily supported by standard human biases. This raises two issues one of which is not that relevant but is worth mentioning and the other which is very relevant. The first, less relevant issue, is that this means we should probably assume that we are likely to overestimate our chance that the hypothesis is correct. This is not however an argument against the hypothesis. But there's a similar claim that is a sort of meta-argument against the hypothesis. Since this hypothesis is one which is supported by human biases one would expect a lot of motivated cognition for evidence and arguments for the hypothesis. So if there are any really good arguments one should consider it more likely that they would have been hit on. The fact that they have not suggests that there really aren't any good arguments for it.

I don't understand the basis for the Cosmides and Tooby claim. In their first study, Cosmides and Tooby (1996) solved the difficult part of a Bayesian problem so that the solution could be found by a "cut and paste" approach. The second study was about the same with some unnecessary percentages deleted (they were not needed for the cut and paste solution--yet the authors were surprised when performance improved). Study 3 = Study 2. Study 4 has the respondents literally fill in the blanks of a diagram based on the numbers written in the question. 92% of the students answered that one correctly. Studies 5 & 6 returned the percentages and the students made many errors.

Instead of showing innate, perfect reasoning, the study tells me that students at Yale have trouble with Bayesian reasoning when the question is framed in terms of percentages. The easy versions do not seem to demonstrate the type of complex reasoning that is needed to see the problem and frame it without somebody framing it for you. Perhaps Cosmides and Tooby are correct when they show that there is some evidence that people use a "calculus of probability" but their study showed that people cannot frame the problems without overwhelming amounts of help from somebody who knows the correct answer.

Reference

Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition 58, 1–73, DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(95)00664-8

Typically, the "optimal thinking" argument gets brought up here in the context of evolutionary psychology. Loss aversion makes sound reproductive sense when you're a hunter-gatherer, and performing a Bayesian update carefully doesn't help all that much. But times have changed, and humans have not changed as much.

Heart -> Hearst.

Also, the Edwards example you gives suggests that one story may not be sufficient (I don't know how many times the Enquirer reported on it before other media picked it up, but I know the rest did only months later).

I can't find that content on that page.

I wonder if there aren't any group rationality games that don't seriously undermined group moral and cohesion. The last time I played Mafia people ended up crying and my relationship with my brother and cousin went through traumatic upheaval. Diplomacy is not a better option.

I play online Mafia but haven't attempted to use explicit Bayesian reasoning to do so.

Trying to update even on just the well-defined data looks impossible for humans, trying to update on what other people are saying would be difficult, even with a computer. Also, it seems like there might be certain disadvantages if you turn out to be Mafia.

Yesterday I spoke with my doctor about skirting around the FDA's not having approved of a drug that may be approved in Europe first (it may be approved in the US first). I explained that one first-world safety organization's imprimatur is good enough for me until the FDA gives a verdict, and that harm from taking a medicine is not qualitatively different than harm from not taking a medicine.

We also discussed a clinical trial of a new drug, and I had to beat him with a stick until he abandoned "I have absolutely no idea at all if it will be better for you or not". I explained that abstractly, a 50% chance of being on a placebo and a 50% chance of being on a medicine with a 50% chance of working was better than assuredly taking a medicine with a 20% chance of working, and that he was able to give a best guess about the chances of it working.

In practice, there are other factors involved, in this case it's better to try the established medicine first and just see if it works or not, as part of exploration before exploitation.

This is serious stuff.

You're confuting two things here: whether rationality is valuable to study, and whether rationality is easy to proselytize.

My own experience is that it's been very valuable for me to study the material on Less Wrong- I've been improving my life lately in ways I'd given up on before, I'm allocating my altruistic impulses more efficiently (even the small fraction I give to VillageReach is doing more good than all of the charity I practiced before last year), and I now have a genuine understanding (from several perspectives) of why atheism isn't the end of truth/meaning/morals. These are all incredibly valuable, IMO.

As for proselytizing 'rationality' in real life, I haven't found a great way yet, so I don't do it directly. Instead, I tell people who might find Less Wrong interesting that they might find Less Wrong interesting, and let them ponder the rationality material on their own without having to face a more-rational-than-thou competition.

Can you imagine a perfectly competent person -- say, a science student -- who hasn't heard of "rationalism" in our sense of the world, finding such instruction appealing? I really can't.

At some point I was that person. Weren't you?

Not as a bridge to other disciplines, or a way to meet cool people. I mean, is the subject matter itself valuable as a discipline in your opinion?

A little bit but it varies wildly based on who you are.

Is there enough to this? Is there anything here worth proselytizing?

Not really.

"Here, let me show you how to think more clearly"

I was recently around some old friends who are lacking in rationality, and kept finding myself at a complete loss. I wanted to just grab them and say exactly that.

In other news, I've learned that some lessons in how to politely and subtly teach rationality would be quite welcome >.>

I'm starting to doubt

Where's that coming from, then?

.

The Kolmogorov complexity changes by an amount bounded by a constant when you change languages, but the order of the programs is very much allowed to change. Where did you get that it wasn't?

LessWrong does in fact fail to properly nofollow the link. I've reported it to Trike.

For actual humans, I'd look into ways of possibly activating the placebo effect without explicit degrees of belief, such as intense visualization of the desired outcome.

Actually, you can solve this problem just by snapping your fingers, and this will give you all the same benefits as the placebo effect! Try it - it's guaranteed to work!

Your model assumes a constant effect in each iteration. Is this justified?

I would envisage a constant chance of recovery and an asymptotically declining estimate of recovery. It seems more realistic, but maybe it's just me?

Speaking of Omega setting up an isomorphic situation, the Newcomb's Box problems do a good job of expressing this.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nc/newcombs_problem_and_regret_of_rationality/

However, I also though of a side question. Is the person who is caught in a cycle of negative thinking like the placebo effect that you mention, engaging in confirmation bias?

I mean, if that person thinks "I am caught in a loop of updates that will inexorably lead to my certain death." And they are attempting to establish that that is true, they can't simply say "I went from 80%/40% to 40%/20% to 20%/10%, and this will continue. I'm screwed!" as evidence of it's truth, because that's like saying "4,6,8" "6,8,10" "8,10,12" as the guesses for the rule that you know "2,4,6" follows. and then saying "The rule is even numbers, right? Look at all this evidence!"

If a person has a hypothesis that their thoughts are leading them to an inexorable and depressing conclusion, then to test the hypothesis, the rational thing to do is for that person to try proving themselves wrong. By trying "10,8,6" and then getting "No, that is not the case." (Because the real rule is numbers in increasing order.)

I actually haven't confirmed that this idea myself yet. I just thought of it now. But casting it in this light makes me feel a lot better about all the times I perform what appear at the time to be self delusions on my brain when I'm caught in depressive thinking cycles, so I'll throw it out here and see if anyone can contradict it.

Updating on the evidence of yourself updating is almost as much as a problem as is updating on the evidence of "I updated on the evidence of myself updating". Tongue-in-cheek!

That is to say, the decision theory you are currently running is not equipped to handle the class of problems where your response to a problem is evidence that changes the nature of the very problem you are responding to - in the same way that arithmetic is not equipped to handle problems requiring calculus or CDT is not equipped to handle Omega's two-box problem.

(If it helps your current situation, placebo effects are almost always static modifiers on your scientific/medical chances of recovery)

Can you see what an absurdly implausible scenario you must use as a ladder to demonstrate rationality as a liability? Rather than being a strike against strict adherence to reality. The fact that we have to stretch so hard to paint it this way, further legitimizes the pursuit of rationality.

atucker wrote a Discussion post about this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/22/placebo-effect-patients-sham-drug It is also well worth noting that the Placebo Effect works just fine even if you know it's just a Placebo Effect. I hadn't realized it worked for others, but I've been abusing this one for a lot of my life, thanks to a neurological quirk that makes placebos especially potent for me.

I think one way to avoid having to call this regret of rationality would be to see optimism as deceiving, not yourself, but your immune system. The fact that the human body acts differently depending on the person's beliefs is a problem with human biology, which should be fixed. If Omega does the same thing to an AI, Omega is harming that AI, and the AI should try to make Omega stop it.

And to show this isn't JUST a quirk of human mind design, one can envision Omega setting up an isomorphic problem for any kind of AI.

An AI can presumably self-modify. For a sufficient reward from Omega, it is worth degrading the accuracy of one's beliefs, especially if the reward will immediately allow one to make up for the degradation by acquiring new information/engaging in additional processing.

(A hypothetical: Omega offers me 1000 doses of modafinil, if I will lie on one PredictionBook.com entry and say -10% what I truly believe. I take the deal and chuckle every few minutes the first night, when I register a few hundred predictions to make up for the falsified one.)

To fully solve this problem requires answering the question of how the placebo effect physically works, which requires answering the question of what a belief physically is, to have that physical effect.

However, no-one yet knows the answers to those questions, which renders all of these logical arguments about as useful as Zeno's proof that arrows cannot move. The problem of how to knowingly induce a placebo response is a physical one, not a logical one. Nature has no paradoxes.

I don't think it's a paradox, it's just that the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good. Your brain has a lot of different components. With a lot of effort, you can change the way some of them think. Some of them will always be irrational no matter what either because they are impossible to change much or because there just isn't enough time in your life to do it.

Given that some components are irretrievably irrational, you may be better off in terms of accomplishing your goals if other components -- which you might be able to change -- stay somewhat irrational.

If the placebo effect actually worked exactly like that, then yes, you would die while the self-deluded person would do better. However, from personal experience, I highly suspect it doesn't (I have never had anything that I was told I'd be likely to die from, but I believe even minor illnesses give you some nonzero chance of dying). Here is how I would reason in the world you describe:

1. There is some probability I will get better from this illness, and some probability I will die.

2. The placebo effect isn't magic, it is a real part of the way the mind interacts with the body. It will also decrease my chances of dying.

3. I don't want to die.

4. Therefore I will activate the effect.

5. To activate the effect for maximum efficiency, I must believe that I will certainly recover.

6. I have activated the placebo effect. I will recover (Probability: 100%). Max placebo effect achieved!

7. The world I live in is weird.

In the real world, the above mental gymnastics are not necessary. Think about the things that would make you, personally, feel better during your illness. What makes you feel more comfortable, and less unhappy, when you are ill? For me, the answer is generally a tasty herbal tea, being warm (or cooled down if I'm overheated), and sleeping. If I am not feeling too horrible, I might be up to enjoying a good novel. What would make you feel most comfortable may differ. However, since both of us enjoy thinking rationally, I doubt spouting platitudes like "I have 100% chances of recovery! Yay!" is going to make you personally feel better. Get the benefits of pain reduction and possibly better immune response of the placebo effect by making yourself more physically and mentally comfortable. When I do these things, I don't think they help me get better because they have some magical ability in and of themselves. I think they will help me get better because of the positive associations I have for them. Hope that helps you in some way.

I think that humans can mentally self-modify to some extant, especially if it really really matters. If you really needed to be optimistic, you might be able to modify yourself to be such by significantly participating in certain types of organized religion. (This is a rather extreme example -- a couple minutes of brainstorming would probably yield ideas with (much?) lower cost and similar results, but it illustrates the possibility.)

Expected utility maximizers are not necessarily served by updating their map to accurately reflect the territory -- there are cases such as the above when one might make an effort to willingly make one's map reflect the territory less accurately. The reason why expected utility maximizers often do try to update their map to accurately reflect the territory is that it usually yields greater utility in comparison to alternative strategies -- having an accurate map is (I would guess) not much of a source of terminal utility for most.

ETA: Missing words. >.<

The scenario you propose does seem inevitably to cause a rational agent to lose. However, it is not realistic, and I can't think of any situations in real life that are like this-- your fate is not magically entangled with your beliefs. Though real placebo effects are still not fully understood, they don't seem to work this way: they may make you feel better, but they don't actually make you better. Merely feeling better could actually be dangerous if, say, you think your asthma is cured and decide to hike down into the Grand Canyon.

Maybe there are situations I haven't thought of where this is a problem, though. Can you give a detailed example of how this paradox obtrudes on your life? I think you might get more useful feedback that way.

The current Open Thread would be a good place to do that. If you want to wait a day, there will be a new weekly Open Thread and you will see it at the top of the Discussion section.

EDIT: Also, feel free to introduce yourself in the current Welcome Thread.

This isn't actually considered an open question in neurobiology, right?

It isn't a question in neurobiology at all. If consciousness is epiphenomenal, then by definition you can't perform any experiment to detect its existence. And insofar as neurology is the attempt to discover the material composition of the brain and the causal structure of brain events, and epiphenomenalism holds that consciousness is immaterial and causally silent, well...

I got in a discussion with a philosophy grad student today

I made that mistake once too.

but she seemed rather insistent on this point

Uh huh.

This isn't actually considered an open question in neurobiology, right?

No. It's crazy talk.

I think the question here is not "is this an open question" but "are there people who disbelieve this?". I can imagine neurobiologists who cannot rule out epiphenomena about thoughts.

Yvain posted on this at length here.

His link there is broken; he is referencing the introduction to Book 4.

It ain't just you. Go to your local Barnes and Noble and they will inevitably have a dozen Crowley titles. I still have his books but I don't meet up with his fans any more.

http://singinst.org/aboutus/visitingfellows

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1hn/call_for_new_siai_visiting_fellows_on_a_rolling/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/29c/be_a_visiting_fellow_at_the_singularity_institute/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3fk/where_in_the_world_is_the_siai_house/

While the SIAI page says that "We are currently accepting applications for new Visiting Fellows", I'm under the impression that the program's no longer running.

Ok, now it is a 200 drop in the 30 days while the absolute increases by about 100. WTF was I doing back then? I didn't write a top level post. Must have been some sort of political drama that I lucked out and got on the popular side of.

Could someone please explain the response to this comment? What I'm most curious about are the responses to the attached poll replies. Multiple people have downvoted each entry in the poll without comment. This ruins the poll for the participants, as one can no longer tell how many people have voted for each option. Do not do this on polls until either LW shows more than net votes, or there is a better way to poll.

I also don't understand downvoting this comment without criticizing it and helping me fix its problems. I have discussed this topic with several LW participants and have gotten each of the two types of responses multiple times, and I think a previously undiscussed issue that gets divergent intuitions from people who theretofore have believed themselves having very similar philosophies is potentially interesting. If I am not criticized, I do not know how to improve. It is currently sitting at -2 but it has been upvoted several times as well, five or more people have downvoted without comment.

I'm not shy about posting things in discussion if I think they merit it, but I didn't think this topic did, so I posted it in the open thread. If this issue is not appropriate for an open thread, where is it appropriate for?

On the first island, everyone likes everyone else's joke equally. All still have equal status from each person's perspective. Is there more status on that island than before?

On the second island, everyone dislikes everyone else's joke equally. All still have equal status from each person's perspective. Is there less status on that island than before?

My intuition is that status is meaningful relative to other people's, so this is similar to the inflation of a currency. In all the ways that status can be used to get people to do things, there isn't any more or less of it.

What happens when one person on the first island asks for help building a fire?

Whether or not the others help em depends on the temperature of the island. Like I said before, my intuition is that status is relative. If they do help em, ey gains some amount of status relative to them. If they don't, ey loses a similar amount of status.

EDIT: The following is based on a misinterpretation of lessdazed.

Assuming you mean third island: The other people help em, and ey gains a bit of status in the process. Ey now has slightly more status than the others. The reverse happens on the fourth island.

Status is all relative

Status is not all relative

Status isn't the only variable in these scenarios. One can feel more or less bonded to someone independent of status, for example.

Karma sink

Twelve people are stranded on four almost identical desert islands, three apeice (the fourth island is warmer than the other three, which are identical). They have no hope of rescue. Each person has equal status from each person's perspective. On the first two islands, each person tells a joke to lighten the mood, or perhaps they tell each other of their backgrounds, they interact in a way that alters status alone but not feelings of romance, kinship, etc.

On the first island, everyone likes everyone else's joke equally, or is impressed with everyone's background equally. All still have equal status from each person's perspective. Is there more status on that island than before?

On the second island, everyone dislikes everyone else's joke equally, or despises everyone's background equally. All still have equal status from each person's perspective. Is there less status on that island than before?

On the third island, one person asks for help starting a fire. The other two feel compelled by his status to comply, they do not feel they have the status to refuse.

On the fourth island, one person asks for help starting a fire, but the island is very, very, very slightly warmer than on the other, almost identical islands. The other two don't feel compelled by his status to comply, they feel they have the status to refuse. The temperature plays a role, they don't care quite as much about making a fire as the other nine people, and this small factor was decisive, as was every other factor militating against helping build a fire, such as social ones. All were necessary conditions to not helping.

What happens if subsequently one person on the first island asks for help building a fire?

What happens if subsequently one person on the second island asks for help building a fire? How does this differ from what happened on the first island when someone asked for help building a fire?