High Status and Stupidity: Why?

As a first step, let me just enumerate some hypotheses inconsistent with yours to see if they stick: (all intended to explain why higher-status people seem smarter)

• Higher status increases the amount of face you lose when you continue to believe something obviously untrue, or increases the cost of losing face.
• High-status individuals were less intelligent when they were young; the observed disparity is due solely to the wisdom that comes with age.
• High-status individuals spend more time on dinners and politics, and less time on problem-solving and reading; they exercise their minds more.
• High-status individuals are under more pressure to perform, in general.
• High-status individuals are just as smart as they ever were, but when you or I try to approach them, the status disparity makes it harder to converse with them - they would sound less intelligent if we had higher status ourselves.
• High-status individuals feel more social pressure to listen to your arguments, respond articulately to them, or change their minds when their own arguments are inadequate, which increases their apparent or real intelligence.
• High-status individuals get more honest advice from their friends, especially about their own failings (and have better friends).

Another way of looking at this is that the lower status person was just as stupid but no one noticed it. It is probably a lot easier to forgive/forget faults in someone who is lower status because they don't matter as much.

So, if we have an intelligent conversation with a grad-student we pick out the good stuff and remember it. If we have a similar conversation with someone higher-status we pick out the good and the bad stuff and remember.

ETA: It would be interesting to see a compare and contrast between this and the halo effect.

11) Status doesn't make people stupid, rather traits other than intelligence determine status, making it unlikely that the highest status individual in a group will also be the most intelligent.

IE- Do the most intelligent scientists really get the most grant money? Does the most intelligent candidate usually win the election? Are the most arrogant mofos (self perceiving high-status) really the smartest?

That being said, I do see a positive correlation with intelligence and status, but it probably breaks down at the high levels of intelligence you (Eliezer) generally deal with.

I'd be more comfortable with thinking that status produces stupidity if I'd heard the claim from a less contrarian source. My guess is that Eliezer has been talking about somewhat contrarian claims, and I expect smart grad students to be more open to such contrarian claims than are older more world-wise high status folks. If the intelligence test were not conflated with contrarian stuff, I'd expect high status folks to look much better. Of course do tell me if my guess is wrong. Now why higher status folks are less open to contrarian ideas is different issue. That could be because they are less smart on such topics, that they are more knowledgeable about such topics, or just that such openness better fits the desired image of a grad student than a high status person later.

I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary.  In fact I try to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I have achieved acceptance in my tribe.  When my brain begins thinking something that generates a sense of high status within the tribe, I stop thinking that thought.

This is shocking, insofar as many people, as far as I understand, actively do the opposite. I'm surprised I haven't seen you mention this anywhere before.

I've explicitly trained myself to be aware of status feelings, so that I can take them as object, but I hadn't thought to explicitly push against them. (I think this is a big deal for me, one way or the other.)

I refuse to conform to people's expectations of a wise sage who always speaks with kindness and sober deliberation, of which I have said: "I am not bloody Gandalf."

I'm far from convinced that niceness correlates with status (or stupidity). For every Gandalf, there is a Stalin.

In fact, wait a minute! Gandalf is a fictional character. And indeed, though history is full of Stalins, I'm actually having trouble thinking of very many real-life Gandalfs. There are of course plenty of legends about wise, kind rulers; but it seems that very few actual historical (as opposed to fictional) high-status people have had this "Gandalf" disposition you speak of.

So really, is this your true rejection of niceness?

From: You and Your Research

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

Here is another mechanism by which status could make you "stupid", although I'm interpreting stupid in a different sense: as in making one less productive than one otherwise might. Although, I think the critique could be more general.

Its generally only worth talking about things that we can make progress in understanding so if you have an inflated sense of what you can accomplish then you might try to think about and discuss things that you cannot advance. So you end up wasting your mental efforts more and you fall behind on other areas that would have been a better use of your talents.

The thing I've noticed about high status people is that they're only interested in associating with other high status people. But low status people are interested in associating with high status people. So high status people seem to spend a lot of time assuming that the person who just came up to talk to them is only interested in shining in their status. So a hypothesis:

• More time defending status than low status people need to spend
• Energy spent identifying need to defend status prevents engaged interaction with many of the people who come up to them.

To test this hypothesis, I would argue that high status people are more intelligent when they are in either contexts where they only interact with high status people or contexts where no one knows they are high status than they are in contexts where they interact with low status people who know who they are.

I've seen this with people who have high community status -- they're more intelligent in communities that they're not usually members of.

One reason I've had such fun reading the customer-service-horror-story blog Not Always Right is that it provides scads of anecdotal evidence that otherwise bright and competent people, when put in a situation where they feel they have high status (e.g. as a paying customer dealing with an employee), are suddenly quite apt to fail noticing the obvious, refuse to process information given them repeatedly, or read an entire situation confidently wrong.

Related: When people feel powerful, they ignore new opinions.

Don’t bother trying to persuade your boss of a new idea while he’s feeling the power of his position – new research suggests he’s not listening to you. “Powerful people have confidence in what they are thinking. Whether their thoughts are positive or negative toward an idea, that position is going to be hard to change,” said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

The best way to get leaders to consider new ideas is to put them in a situation where they don’t feel as powerful, the research suggests.

“If you temporarily make a powerful person feel less powerful, you have a better chance of getting them to pay attention,” said Pablo Briñol, lead author of the study and a social psychologist at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. Briñol is a former postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State.

I can think of at least two high status individuals I've met in the corporate world that displayed a wide range of intelligence depending on their audience.

To some people they would be very direct, ask the right questions, give the right advice, and be generally intelligent.

To others they would display less competence, ask obvious or stupid questions, and generally seem less intelligent.

I always supposed the latter cases were either:

• A display of "Such minor details are of no concern to me; I will play dumb to assert my status"

• "Let's see who will challenge me when I say something stupid, and then I'll know who the smart/bold ones are in this group"

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to upvote the whole discussion of an article, but I appreciate the way people are kicking the hypothesis around to see whether it makes sense.

Here's my hypothesis: once you achieve high status, a part of your mind makes you lose interest in the thing that you achieved high status with in the first place. You might feel obligated to maintain an appearance of interest, and defend your position from time to time, but you no longer feel a burning need to know the truth.

One solution that might work (and I think has worked for me, although I didn't consciously choose it) is to periodically start over. Once you've achieved recognition in some area, and no longer have as much interest in it as you used to, go into a different community focused on a different topic, and start over from a low-status (or at least not very high status) position. Of course this doesn't work unless there are several things that you can work on whose marginal utilities aren't too far apart. (It probably doesn't apply to Eliezer for example.)

I refuse to conform to people's expectations of a wise sage who always speaks with kindness and sober deliberation, of which I have said: "I am not bloody Gandalf."

I'm not sure the benefit of this one is higher than the cost.

High status people tend to be significantly busier, and their attention is faced with consistently higher demands. As such, they have developed much more complicated filters to remove distractions, which you will have to navigate before you can have an intelligent conversation with them.

"Did I miss anything important?"

Yeah. Maybe the observation is false to begin with. I doubt high status people are less intelligent. We just expect more from them because we are supposed to be able to look up to them. They are probably intelligent people who are no more intelligent than other low status intelligent people. They disappoint us because they are only as smart, not more smart, when compared to others of the same IQ level.

What about some concrete examples of people who have lost their edge because they achieved high status? Or some counter examples?

If I am thinking of some people of high status in different intellectual fields, say, scientists like Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russel or even technologists like Linus Torvalds, Paul Graham; I'm not sure I can see the kind of "High Status Stupidity" there. Or did I just pick the wrong examples?

Some support for hypothesis 4 (assuming a correlation between status and age):

Not only do studies show that fluid intelligence decreases with age but the psychological trait Openness to experience also declines with age. Openness is related to characteristics like curiosity, independence of mind and broad interests, which should facilitate the possibility of having an "intelligent conversation".

How about "high status individuals face larger opportunity costs to their time, reducing the relative hedonic value of increasing understanding. The instrumental value of understanding increases more than linearly with opportunity costs for them, but the instrumental value of understanding is systematically undervalued by people at all status levels because it can't be clearly visualized and so it isn't very affect laden. The net consequence is to increase the normal bias towards underinvestment in information.

High status individuals, being older, tend to rely on memory more than creativity to solve problems. As a result, their first response to a given situation is often slightly mistuned; the first answer they remember was appropriate to a similar situation but often slightly inappropriate to the current situation.

I think the overjustification effect might be at play.

The overjustification effect occurs when an external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task. According to self-perception theory, people pay more attention to the incentive, and less attention to the enjoyment and satisfaction that they receive from performing the activity. The overall effect is a shift in motivation to extrinsic factors and the undermining of pre-existing intrinsic motivation.

In this case, the reward is status. It's important to note that the person must anticipate the reward, though. People might explicitly seek status, but subconsciously seeking status might provide enough anticipation to create the effect.

I am taking Eliezer's definition of "stupidity" to mean increased incompetence in the field wherein the person gained status. In their field, we would expect high competence. Decreased competence in their field would come about from diminished interest in that field, from the overjustification effect.

High status allows one to blow off what one finds ridiculous instead of saying "yes, that is interesting. Have you considered the counter argument...." The moderate risk of the idea not being ridiculous is out-weighed by not having to suffer fools. See Bill Gates famous "That's the most stupid thing I have ever heard" as the prime example.

Thus, it's easier to have good conversations with grad students than faculty even if faculty is smarter.

"I consistently refuse to be drawn into running the Singularity Institute. I have an overwhelming sense of doom about what happens if I start going down that road."

This strikes me as pretty strange. I would like to hear more about it.

Certainly, one can obtain status by other means, such as by posting at OB and LW, and presenting at conferences, etc. Are there other reasons why you don't want to "run" the Singularity Institute?

Add to your list "High status allows people to speak/write for the purpose of influence, where lower status forces them to stick to more objective truths".

Submitting to the social rules of rationality (as with rules in general) is low-status; claiming the right to believe (or generally do) whatever you want is high-status.

Apparent counterexample: high status (at least nominally) assigned to religious elites subject to strict rules of behavior.

It seems like you missed one hypothesis: maybe you're mistaken about the people in question, and they actually never were all that intelligent. They achieved their status via other means. It's an especially plausible error because they have high status--surely they must have got where they are by dint of great intellect!

1. High status individuals face more demands on their time/attention, and have less time to update themselves regarding important issues. If they attempt to comment on issues on which they have insufficient information, they may very well appear to be stupid.

(I try very hard to avoid commenting on things about which I know that I know too little.)

Another hypothesis: high status people attract crackpots and then develop mental habits to protect themselves. When you talk to a high status person under most circumstances, you're not talking to the person -- you're talking to the spam filter. It's built out of brain, but using a small fraction of attention, so it's not really sentient.

This predicts that if you can get past the spam filter (with the right introduction, or by saying or doing something unfakably interesting), the effect should go away. And quite suddenly.

There's also what one could call the "baroni effect". I'm pretty sure that Robin Hanson has linked to this article. The gist is that, e.g., Italian academics esconced in high status positions will intentionally signal their (academic) incompetence in order to make it more credible that they will viciously defend their perks - because an incompetent could not profit by doing anything else.

Anyway, the question is: why do you tend to get the impression from high status people that they're dumber than they ought to be, given everything else you know about them? One more reason is that people are biased to see people of perceived higher status as dumber. Such a bias would be especially acute in a very intelligent person, who would regularly see dumber people of higher status than he. Plainly you think that the higher status people you discuss here have higher status than you yourself. This feeds directly into this post of yours, in my opinion. I would be very surprised if the instinctive tendency of a teenager to rebel against his parents, in order to attain greater status, was not positively correlated with the disparity between their "true" status and the status that as parents they claim for themselves. By direct analogy, when we see anyone who has high status but seems less intelligent than we are (or less strong, less brave, less sexy...) the urge arises to expose that fact, to create a comparison on that point between them and us, and thus to displace them as the one with high status. Such an urge, whether acted on or not, will nevertheless cause us to undervalue some characteristics of high status people.

I don't completely understand the original post: What do you mean by "high status"?

• Lot of money?
• Lot of political influence?
• High academic reputation?
• ???

It is a completely different question why is it hard to have a good conversation with a congressman or with a famous string theorist.

I don't have much experience with the first categories (economically, politically influential people) but with scientific people (in natural sciences, mathematics and engineering) my experience has been that high status individuals (university professors, researchers) are in average much more fun to talk to than grad students. At least, this was my subjective personal impression.

Fascinating hypothesis for sure. I would be interested in seeing how this intersects with the Dunning–Kruger Effect.

Maybe the Peter's principle? High status people are given more and more responsibilities, which are not the things that they were initially good at, so they end up being functionally stupid for a lot of the time?

I've seen this happening with many math professors diverted into administration. Which is one of the big reasons math professors don't normally want to go into adminstration and power.

I think your premise is false, there's weak positive correlation between being smart and status, and you make a mistake most likely by comparing unusually smart low status individuals (grad students are not anywhere close to being typical low status people!!!) with random high status individuals.

Some of your arguments, especially #4, might very well be true, but I don't think they're anywhere near reversing the smartness-status correlation.

How about ritualizing admiting your own mistakes? One day every month find as much instances as possible where you were wrong in the month that passed. Then you can feel bad about finding not finding enough ideas where you were wrong and signal to your brain that it better updates beliefs more often to be a good rationalist and therefore increase status.

How about a combination of 1 and 7. It isn't the high status itself that raises the cost of losing face, it is the status disparity between the high status person and the low status interlocutor. Listening to and accepting the interlocutor's arguments means reducing (to some extent) the disparity. But high status people can engage in intelligent conversation with their equals.

Would it be helpful if we occasionally mocked, berated and told you how low-status you really are in the scheme of things? (Only half kidding).

High-Status relative to what/whom?

I would like to add another reason why we might perceive high status individuals as being less intelligent (or talented) than they originally seemed. The effect under consideration is reversion to the mean. Often, a person gains high status (or, at least meaningfully begins the climb to having high status) as a result of one exceptional act or creation or work. If our average skill level is X, we may often produce works that require skill close to X, but occasionally produce works that require much greater or much less skill than X (due to natural variability or variance in our performance). We are much more likely to be recognized (gain high status) when we happen to produce something far above our own skill level than when we create something right near our skill level (due simply to the fact that works above our skill level are of higher quality than most of what we create, and quality productions are more likely to be recognized). Hence, you might expect that many famous people's works that got them noticed (whether it is a novel, movie, essay, business deal, or what have you) may actually be better than would be expected from their average skill level. Hence, future work will seem less good by comparison.

This same effect might partly explain why highly anticipated movie sequels are in many cases not as good as the originals. The creators of the original may well have produced a work significantly above their average skill level (which made the movie more likely to become famous in the first place because so much skill was required), whereas the sequel will likely be closer to their true level!

For more about the statistical effect, google "Reversion to the Mean".

High status people are usually trusted with status because their methods/opinions match those who follow them. The pace of change-of-opinion will be slow for followers who have too-high a dependence on the authority of status.

High status people need only to be "effectively" stupid: you are compelled (whether or not you are stupid) to match the pace of change of those who uphold your status, as long as you value your status. Others who are more "effectively" stupid will usurp your status, if you exercise your intelligence and publicly abandon those who are dependent on your authority.

Thanks for doing those things, Eliezer.

Likely just higher visibility. High status individuals are, almost by definition, more visible than others, or than they were previously, so their "stupid moments" are more likely to be noticed.

The fact that they are high status and you are low status is evidence that they're right, reducing their incentive to listen.

Worse, if they listen and are convinced, this is evidence that they are low status, and you're high status.

Perhaps you would find it easier to have intelligent conversations with high-status people if you had equal status. They may just not be paying full attention.

When my brain begins thinking something that generates a sense of high status within the tribe, I stop thinking that thought.

How do you know that your desire for preserving your intelligence (by ignoring thoughts that give a sense of high status) is not a status-seeking desire itself? Maybe it gives you feelings of high status to think you can dodge status-seeking feelings.

Vasar's hypothesis could have another outcome: raising the status of a low-status person without necessarily lowering the status of a high-status person.

The measures you propose sound good, but bear in mind that the original proposition hasn't been properly proven.

I reckon you've reversed the causation. Stupidity causes high status. Consider the case of Kevin here and here

I like you list of hypotheses as to why high status people may be effectively stupid. I think an interesting exercise is to turn the assumption around and find reasons why high status people are not effectively stupid. Comparing between the two sets of hypotheses could reveal both structural issues to the problem and biases to your thinking.

Given that Eliezer Yudkowsky could be defined as a high-status person does provoke a few questions. Is one able to have intelligent conversations with Eliezer Yudkowsky? Is Eliezer Yudkowsky, given his high-status, able to judge other high-status people who may very well perceive him to be of equal or high-status? In other words, given his high profile, intelligence and personality, is his perception regarding status and the nature of intelligent conversations biased?

Is there any data supporting the assertion that high-status people are more stupid? It's a testable hypothesis.

You're confusing the superficial expressions of high-status and the nature of normal human interaction, which is nothing but status games. Your texts, this and others, very clearly signal high-status in this context. It is clearly not your sole motivation, not perhaps even a major one, but status moves are apparent throughout your texts.

"Having achieved some small degree of status in certain very limited circles, here's what I do to try to avoid the status-makes-you-stupid effect"

Seriously, you saying that you have achieved "some small degree of status" is a huge understatement. If you used that expression, because stronger statement would make you vulnerable, I guess it makes sense, but do realize that it's just another move in status-games. It's basically a defensive move to counter possible attacks against your status. Ie. it lowers your status so that no one can make threats to your status. Had you said that "I am practically a Jesus in some circles", which would have been close to the truth, this could have been challenged very easily. When it's put the way you said it, it's more of an compliment to yourself.

If you really think that you have achieved "some small degree of status", I think you have a huge blind spot in the area of human social interaction.

"I try to feel a small flash of self-satisfaction whenever I publicly admit that I am wrong, over what a good rationalist I am being and what a good impression I am making."

This is a status move to make your status higher.