It seems like a large part of the problem is not that our brains unconsciously optimize for prestige per se, but they incorrectly optimize for prestige. Surely, having to take extra years to graduate and damaging one's own cause are not particularly prestigious. Helping Eliezer write a book will at least net you an acknowledgement, and you also get to later brag about how you were willing to do important work that nobody else was.
I don't have much empirical data to support this, but I suspect it might help (or at least might be worth trying to see if it helps) if you consciously optimized for prestige and world-saving simultaneously (as well as other things that you unconsciously want, like leisure), instead of trying to fight yourself. I have a feeling that in the absence of powerful self-modification technologies, trying to fight one's motivation to seek prestige will not end well.
Seconding this.
As Michael Vassar would put it: capitalism with a 10% tax rate nets a larger total amount of tax revenue (long-term) than does communism with an alleged 100% tax rate -- because, when people see economic activity as getting them what they want, the economy grows more, and one ends up achieving more total, and hence also more for all major parties, than one achieves when thinking about total economic goods as a zero-sum thing to be divided up.
You have a bunch of different motives inside you, some of which involve status -- and those motives can be a source of motivation and action. If you help your status-seeking motives learn how to actually effectively acquire status (which involves hard work, promise keeping, pushing out of your comfort zone, and not wireheading on short-term self-image at the expense of goals), you can acquire more capability, long term -- and that capability can be used partly for world-saving. But you only get to harness this motive force if your brain expects that exerting effort will actually lead to happiness and recognition long term.
I can attest that I had those exact reactions on reading those sections of the article. And in general I am more impressed by someone who graduated quickly than one who took longer than average, and by someone who wrote a book rather than one who hasn't. "But what if that's not the case?" is hardly a knock-down rebuttal.
I think it's more likely you're confusing the status you attribute to Kaj for candidness and usefulness of the post, with the status you would objectively add or subtract from a person if you heard that they floundered or flourished in college.
Your comment and this post have really clarified a lot of the thoughts I've had about status - especially as someone who is largely motivated by how others perceive me - thanks!
I'm actually kind of ambivalent about it myself. Sometimes I wish I could go back to a simpler time when I thought that I was driven by pure intellectual curiosity alone. For someone whose "native" status-seeking tendencies aren't as destructive as the OP's, the knowledge may not be worth the cost.
Any thoughts on how to best consciously optimize for prestige?
Search for your comparative advantage (usually mentioned in the context of maximizing income, but is equally applicable to maximizing prestige). This can be counterintuitive so give it a second thought even if you think you already know. For example, in college I thought I was great at programming and never would have considered a career having to do with philosophy. Well, I am terrible at philosophy but as it turns out, so is everyone else, and I might actually have a greater comparative advantage in it than in programming.
Look for the Next Big Thing so you can write that seminal paper that everyone else will then cite. More generally, ...
I don't try to not seek status, I try to channel my status-seeking drive into things that will actually be useful.
Hm, while I'm flattered to have provided a springboard for this discussion, I find it ironic that most of the discussion thread consists of either status-seeking arguments, or else people agreeing that this is a Serious Problem -- and implicitly noting how useful it will be in showing how hard they're trying to overcome it. ;-)
AFAICT, nobody is asking how it can be fixed, whether it can be fixed, or actually proposing any solutions. (Except of course in the original discussion you linked to, but I don't get the impression anybody from this post is really reading that discussion.)
(For anyone who is interested in that, this post offers some pointers.)
but I wondered why Kaj hadn't included any solutions
I've been somewhat helped by simply realizing the problem. For example, recently I was struggling with wanting to study a lot of math and mathy AI, because that's the field that my brain has labeled the most prestigious (mostly as a result of reading Eliezer et al.). When I realized that I had been aiming at something that I felt was prestigious, not something that was actually my comparative advantage, it felt like a burden was lifted from my shoulders. I realized that I could actually take easier courses, and thereby manage to finish my Master's degree.
Comparative advantage is eating the sort of food that most greatly increases your fish size in the pond whose size implies the greatest marginal payoff for adding fish of the size you can become if you enter that pond.
I want to pursue my comparative advantage because that's the best way that I can help SIAI and other good causes, regardless of status considerations. Pursuing mathy stuff is only worthwhile if that's my best way of helping the causes I consider valuable.
Or to put it more succinctly: if being a big fish in a small pond, or even a small fish in a small pond, lets me make money that can be used to hire big fish in big ponds, then I'd rather do that than be a small fish in a big pond.
(I won't try to claim that I've left the status framework entirely, just to some extent on this particular issue. Heck, I'm regularly refreshing this post to see whether it's gotten more upvotes.)
I'm not trying to avoid status considerations. I'm only trying to avoid them hijacking my reasoning process in such a way that I think the best ways of achieving status are also the best ways of achieving my non-status goals.
I can't completely ignore status considerations, but I might be able to trade a high-status path that achieves no other goals, to a path that is somewhat lower in status but much better at achieving my other goals. But that requires being able to see that the paths actually have different non-status outcomes.
Isn't it a flaw of many thinkers that if you give them a question, they try to answer it?
It's also a Fully General Argument (and Excuse) for not solving problems.
I've been reading Robin Hanson for five years or so and while I could often notice tendencies he describes that I found in myself, the comprehensiveness of the problem just hadn't come home to me. Just about everything I do is motivated in whole or in a large part by status seeking, and for some reason I didn't know that until just now.
This is probably what I've been struggling with the most during my life. I'm starting to feel like I'm close to reaching a balance in overcoming it though.
Early on my primary goal in life was being Good. Along with a bunch of other traits, I deemed status seeking and signalling as Evil and strove never to do it.
That... is hard to do and of course I didn't succeed fully. What I did manage was becoming terribly passive and self-effacing, I second-guessed any activity I engaged in even as I was doing it and abandoned anything I recognized as being signalling or status increasing unless I could come up with a convincing reason why it was objectively good. In the last few years I have reconsidered somewhat. I still have a gut instinct against it but I slowly changed my personality to accept and then embrace it since I recognized that would make me a better person.
I guess this is adding to the other comments that, yes, status and signalling is a mind killer and the first step is to notice and acknowledge that you are participating in it. The second step isn't to surpress it though, but to shape it and use it to fit who you want to be.
I still hate bragging*, so to balance the positive signaling I just did I'll add in that another, less idealistic part of my passive behavior was and probably still is the anti motto "If you don't try, no one can judge your goals or blame you for failing".
*and hate that saying so is itself bragging** :)
**recursively
I seem to remember reading that males tend to status-seeking behaviors more than females. Or maybe it was that women seek status in a more social context. Either way, I can't find it now.
But my personal experiences are very different. Anything I've done that you could consider "high-status", I've only done because it was pretty much thrust at me. You mentioned that you disliked doing low status work, but for me even when I went into engineering (because my family didn't support me going into social work), my dream job was to work for a very small engineering firm or branch, that needed an assistant that could do all sorts of tasks. Smart enough to understand the material, but also willing to sit down and do the menial labor from technical writing, to giving presentations. That's still something I would love to do.
I guess what motivates me personally in my work is the desire to be appreciated, which is why I love child and disability care so much, and dislike my other job which is high pay, but low usefulness. But it seems like I am completely in the minority here and I don't know if that is because:
a) This site is dominated by status-seekers- perhaps because of the style (debating), substance (rationality) or demographics (male)
b) The people who commented also happen to be status-seekers - perhaps because those who weren't didn't feel compelled to write
c) Something else
They just see meat to eat with their eyes, not a person.
Typical mind fallacy, perhaps?
I don't know about you, but if I happen to be watching someone stripping it's much more about the meeting of the eyes than the eyeing of the meat.
Even prostitutes are probably respected a lot more on average than strippers, since it's more common that people at least talk to prostitutes
Well, if you go by the HBO specials they did about both groups, it's actually the other way around. Though really, people formed long-term relationships with their service providers in both groups.
The same cannot be said of prostitutes, who are lower status than just about anyone in society including the men who use them.
Some prostitutes have high status with their audience. Quickly translated from Punainen eksodus, a PhD sociology thesis on Finnish prostitution:
...Sex workers find that their position favors them: of 25 interviewed workers, 13 felt they were in a dominant position as compared to the customer. 11 felt that the power was evenly distributed so that the sex worker sets the limits inside which the customer makes his choices. The estimate may be related to the relatively good position of Finnish sex workers, but the feeling of power has also been documented in the international literature:
"It [sex work] really challenged the traditional idea of an orgasm as something that the man "gives" me. According to the traditional view, the woman isn't supposed to control the sex act, but to be the passive recipient of whatever happens. But as the prostitute you're the one who sets the pace, you're the one who controls the whole situation." (Maryann from Santa Cruz, interviewed by Chapkins 1997, 85.)
At the time when my material was collected, Finnish s
Compared to members of the actual military (who often do comparable work), contractors are paid much better and respected much less.
This is an excellent post.
I'll toss in another example: volunteering vs. donating to charity. People like the idea of volunteering, even when they could do more good by working longer hours and donating the money to charity.
When I first entered college, I had the idea that I'd go to med school and then join Doctors Without Borders. Do a lot of good in the world, right? The problem was that, while I'm good at a lot of things, biology is not my strong suit, so I found that part of the pre-med requirements frustrating. I ended up giving up and going to grad school in philosophy.
To maximize my do-gooding, I would have been better off majoring in Computer Science or Engineering (I'm really, really good at math), and committing to giving some percentage of my future earnings at a high-paying tech job to charity. Alas...
Now whenever I meet someone who tells me they want to go into a do-gooding career, I tell them they'd be better off becoming lawyers so they can donate lots of money to charity. They never like this advice.
People commit altruistic acts, and then act selfishly and inconsiderately later in the day, once they feel that they have been good enough that they've earned the right to be a little selfish. In other words, they estimate that they've been good enough at presenting an altruistic image that a few transgressions won't threaten that image.
Let me ask a rude question: What makes you so sure you want to "do good"? If you do, this would be a most unusual appetite. People do what they want for other reasons, and then they explain it to themselves and others as "doing good." The motivation to "do good" isn't a primary motive. How could it be? From where might it come ? To root that sort of motive in nature, one pretty much has to invent some form of moral realism; you must cross the "is" versus "ought" chasm. Now's not the time to address the mora...
Question: do you have any advice for people who want "to do something about Singularity" but are afraid of falling into the trap you describe?
You can't opt out of signalling any more than you can opt out of going to the bathroom. We all learn as children how to manage the scatological aspects of living on earth. Status is a completely analogous arena, except that everyday thoughts about it are even more sublimated and subconscious. Everyone knows the limits of physical hygiene. The limits of moral hygiene are no less biological or immutable, and no less unpleasant to discuss frankly.
Good show.
To nitpick just a bit, one can genuinely care about a cause, just care about being a lazy piece of shit even more. (I certainly value being lazy a lot, to some of me's annoyance.) Not that that invalidates people generally caring about the appearances more.
so you decide to only do the least prestigeful work available, in order to prove that you are the kind of person who doesn't care about the prestige of the task!
Another variant is to minimize how much you directly inform your comrades of the work you're doing. You tend to get more prestige when people find out about your work through accidental-seeming ways instead of through you telling them. Also, you have aces up your sleeve with which you can play the martyr ("Well, I have been doing such and such and you didn't even know about it!").
This is probably a very dangerous idea but I think it's worth mentioning if only for the purpose of discussion:
What if you completely sabotage your signalling ability by making yourself appear highly undesirable. Then your actions will not be for the purpose of signalling as it would be futile.
I've seen this tried, for this stated purpose. My impression of the results was that it did not at all lead to careful, on-the-margins consequentialist thinking and doing. Instead, it led to a stressed out, strung out person trying desperately to avoid more pain/shame, while also feeling resentful at the world and themselves, expecting a lack of success from these attempts, and so acting more from local self-image gradients, or drama-seeking gradients, than from any motives attached to actual hope of accomplishing something non-immediate.
"Signaling motives" can be stuck on a scale, from "local, short-sighted, wire-heading-like attempts to preserve self-image, or to avoid immediate aversiveness or seek immediate reward" to "long-term strategic optimization to achieve recognition and power". It would be better to have Napoleon as an ally than to have a narcotics addict with a 10 minute time horizon as an ally, and it seems analogously better to help your own status-seeking parts mature into entities that are more like Napoleon and less like the drug addict, i.e. into entities that have strategy, hope, long-term plans, and an accurate model of the fact that e.g. rationalizations don't change the outside world.
tl;dr: Signalling is extremely important to you. Doing away with your ability to signal will leave you helplessly desperate to get it back.
I think that this is a point made not nearly often enough in rationalist circles: Signalling is important to humans, and you are not exempt just because you know that.
Also, a proposed solution in regards to "How to be Altruistic" (in a way that DOESN'T make you feel like you've "been good enough that they've earned the right to be a little selfish.")
I think that the best way to avoid this pitfall is to incorporate whatever altruism that you want to do into your way of life, so that it doesn't feel like a one-time shot.
Example- Instead of donating a lump sum of $50 to the charity of your choice, see if there's a way to have a $1 donation made automatically every week.
Vegetarianism is another example. ...
This is a difficult problem. I have come to realize there is no one solution. The general strategy I think is to have consistency checks on what you are doing. Your subconscious can only trick you into seeking status and away from optimizing your goals by hiding the contradictions from you. But as 'willpower' is not the answer, eternal vigilance isn't either. But rather you pick up via a mass of observation the myriad ways in which you are led astray, and you fix these individually. Pay attention to something different you regularly do every day and check if this comports with your goals. If you are lucky, your subconscious cannot trick you the same way twice. Though it is quite ingenious.
Is this a natural tendency or a flaw of the system? Are humans really status-maximizers, or just satisficers that are perpetually unsatisfied because it is really hard nowadays to have status?
We live as disconnected individuals in a loosely connected tribe of millions of people. To be a respected, noteworthy person in this tribe, you have to be a celebrity. Everyone else feels unworthy. They don't have a reputation, They don't feel known or seen. Everyone is just looking up.
(but maybe I'm just typicalminding here. Let me know)
I have been status-satisfied o...
When I was younger, I thought that I wanted to be a writer because I wanted to be the sort of person who was passionate about something, and since I hadn't found a passion yet and was pretty good at writing, it seemed like a good vessel for that drive. It took me quite awhile to realize that I saw it as a chore and never really wanted to write.
I don't see anything inherently wrong with doing things for the prestige, though, just with lying to yourself about your motivations.
The discussions about signalling reminded me of something in "A Guide To The Good Life" (a book about stoicism by William Irvine). I remembered a philospher who wore shabby clothes, but when I went looking for the quote, what I found was: "Cato consciously did things to trigger the disdain of other people simply so he could practice ignoring their disdain." In stoicism, the utility which is to be maximized is a personal serenity which flows from your secure knowledge that you are spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable.
I don't understand why you call this a problem. If I understand you correctly, you are proposing that people constantly and strongly optimize to obtain signalling advantages. They do so without becoming directly aware of it, which further increases their efficiency. So we have a situation where people want something and choose an efficient way to get it. Isn't that good?
More directly, I'm confused how you can look at an organism, see that it uses its optimization power in a goal-oriented and efficient way (status gains in this case) and call that problemat...
If I understand you correctly, you are proposing that people constantly and strongly optimize to obtain signalling advantages. They do so without becoming directly aware of it, which further increases their efficiency.
"Efficiency" at achieving something other than what you should work towards is harmful. If it's reliable enough, let your conscious mind decide if signaling advantages or something else is what you should be optimizing. Otherwise, you let that Blind Idiot Azathoth pick your purposes for you, trusting it more than you trust yourself.
Our psychological adaptations are not our purposes, we don't want to protect them, even though they contribute to determining what it is we want to protect. See Evolutionary Psychology.
Put it this way, if there was a pill that I believed would cause me to effectively have that goal, in a way that was compatible with a livable life, I would take it.
I agree that this is a very major problem for all of humanity. This single issue is the source of the majority of my akrasia. I stop in my tracks when I detect that I might soon be guilty of this kind of hypocrisy.
Finding a way to nail this issue down and give it a solid definition is pretty important. I'd love to contribute more on the subject, but I have SO little time right now...
Maybe later this week?
I guess you can't want to want stuff. When you genuinely want something (not prestige but an actual goal) you'll easily be in the "flow experience" and lose track of time and actually progress toward the goal without having to force yourself. Actually you have to force yourself to stop in order to sleep and eat because you'd just do this thing all day if you could! Find the thing where you slip into flow easily and do the most efficient thing that's at the same time quite similar to this activity.
Many of my reasons are grounded in wanting to be normal. My appreciation for normality is grounded in many antecedent assumptions like being broadly attractive for conversation with many people, I didn't think to question until I reognised that prior assumptions are consequential to the others. For this particular example, given that I have new information that most people aren't of consequence to me, that I don't value them, I shouldn't value normality so much. I guess this is a bit like an intuitive explanation of the self-help implication of bayes theorum!
Somehow I thought Visiting Fellows at MIRI do more...
"We run on corrupted hardware: our minds are composed of many modules, and the modules that evolved to make us seem impressive and gather allies are also evolved to subvert the ones holding our conscious beliefs. Even when we believe that we are working on something that may ultimately determine the fate of humanity, our signaling modules may hijack our goals so as to optimize for persuading outsiders that we are working on the goal, instead of optimizing for achieving the goal!"
I'm sorry, while I agree whole-heartedly with this assessment, your ...
People may think that they're motivated to study because they want to increase their earnings, but then they don't actually achieve much in their studies. In reality, they might be only motivated to give the impression of being the kind of person who studies hard in order to increase their earnings, and looking like they work hard to study is enough to give this impression.
If you have data on whether studying is an optimal way to increase earnings, let me know or link me in the right direction, because it may have a significant impact on what I'm doing.
I seem to have a quite good intuition for handling these type of problem (might actually be related to especially poor mental health; I get a lot of practice and extreme examples of things). Problem is it's not introspectively available communicable, only it's outputs for specific instances are, and quite often not even those. For the same reason, actually checking how well it works or even defining what that'd mean isn't possible, the only evidence it works is my meta-intuition about what intuitions can be trusted. (The meta-intuition has been sort of tested; it tends to be instrumentally surprisingly useful to trust but not always technically accurate.)
My biggest problem is really that I can't get myself to donate a lot of money. That decision would be met with disbelief by my surroundings. I also fear that, at some point, I might need the money. Otherwise I would have already donated a lot more to the Singularity Institute years ago. As of today I have only donated 3 times, a laughable amount of $30.
And other than money? That takes up a lot of time and effort that I am currently unable to dispense.
You might be suffering from the endowment effect. To test this, you could pretend that a friend of yours found $10,000 but had no need for it, and was asking you whether he should give it to you or SIAI. If you would recommend that the friend donate to SIAI, but you choose to add your next $10,000 of disposable income to your bank account, I don't see much of any explanation outside the endowment effect.
Or, for a more radical thought experiment, ask yourself how much of SIAI's budget you would reallocate to your personal bank account given the chance. (This mimics the reversal test proposed by Nick Bostrom.) Remember, the people who are currently holding funds should not in theory have any impact on what your preferred allocation of those funds would be.
(Side note: I think I just realized how powerful the endowment effect is.)
Which paper or post outlines those core claims? I am not sure what they are.
Mostly just:
I find it very hard to pinpoint when and how I changed my mind about what. I'd be interested to hear some examples to compare my own opinion on those issues, thanks.
Off the top of my head:
This is an excellent post.
I'll toss in another example: volunteering vs. donating to charity. People like the idea of volunteering, even when they could do more good by working longer hours and donating the money to charity.
When I first entered college, I had the idea that I'd go to med school and then join Doctors Without Borders. Do a lot of good in the world, right? The problem was that, while I'm good at a lot of things, biology is not my strong suit, so I found that part of the pre-med requirements frustrating. I ended up giving up and going to grad school in philosophy.
To maximize my do-gooding, I would have been better off majoring in Computer Science or Engineering (I'm really, really good at math), and committing to giving some percentage of my future earnings at a high-paying tech job to charity. Alas...
Now whenever I meet someone who tells me they want to go into a do-gooding career, I tell them they'd be better off becoming lawyers so they can donate lots of money to charity. They never like this advice.
Now whenever I meet someone who tells me they want to go into a do-gooding career, I tell them they'd be better off becoming lawyers so they can donate lots of money to charity. They never like this advice.
This is what Warren Buffett has done. And he quite explicitly over the years said he wasn't going to donate while getting richer because his ability to compound his wealth was above average and so he would do more net good giving it away when he was done. (As it turns out, he gave away stock in his company, which has a very low effect on "shrinking the pie" that he is working with.)
So what you probably mean is, "I intend to do school to improve my chances on the market". But this statement is still false, unless it is also true that "I intend to improve my chances on the market". Do you, in actual fact, intend to improve your chances on the market?
I expect not. Rather, I expect that your motivation is to appear to be the sort of person who you think you would be if you were ambitiously attempting to improve your chances on the market... which is not really motivating enough to actually DO the work. However, by persistently trying to do so, and presenting yourself with enough suffering at your failure to do it, you get to feel as if you are that sort of person without having to actually do the work. This is actually a pretty optimal solution to the problem, if you think about it. (Or rather, if you DON'T think about it!) -- PJ Eby
I have become convinced that problems of this kind are the number one problem humanity has. I'm also pretty sure that most people here, no matter how much they've been reading about signaling, still fail to appreciate the magnitude of the problem.
Here are two major screw-ups and one narrowly averted screw-up that I've been guilty of. See if you can find the pattern.
It may not be immediately obvious, but all three examples have something in common. In each case, I thought I was working for a particular goal (become capable of doing useful Singularity work, advance the cause of a political party, do useful Singularity work). But as soon as I set that goal, my brain automatically and invisibly re-interpreted it as the goal of doing something that gave the impression of doing prestigious work for a cause (spending all my waking time working, being the spokesman of a political party, writing papers or doing something else few others could do). "Prestigious work" could also be translated as "work that really convinces others that you are doing something valuable for a cause".
We run on corrupted hardware: our minds are composed of many modules, and the modules that evolved to make us seem impressive and gather allies are also evolved to subvert the ones holding our conscious beliefs. Even when we believe that we are working on something that may ultimately determine the fate of humanity, our signaling modules may hijack our goals so as to optimize for persuading outsiders that we are working on the goal, instead of optimizing for achieving the goal!
You can see this all the time, everywhere:
There's an additional caveat to be aware of: it is actually possible to fall prey to this problem while purposefully attempting to avoid it. You might realize that you have a tendency to only want to do particularly prestigeful work for a cause... so you decide to only do the least prestigeful work available, in order to prove that you are the kind of person who doesn't care about the prestige of the task! You are still optimizing your actions on the basis of expected prestige and being able to tell yourself and outsiders an impressive story, not on the basis of your marginal impact.