Status Is The Game Of The Losers' Bracket
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Then, open up Forbes’ list of N richest people, and count how many of them got on that list by climbing the management hierarchy at a big company.
I predict that, to within reasonable approximation, the answer will be zero. Nobody gets on Forbes’ list of richest people by climbing the hierarchy at a big company. They get on that list by founding a company, inheriting, or both.
I didn’t check this either, but it reminds me of a fun fact that, if you look at the CEO of a large company, the CEO-founders are roughly population-average height, while the people promoted up to CEO are towering monstrosities. Copying from my post Neuroscience of human sexual attraction triggers:
…I’m not sure if anyone has done a rigorous systematic study to back that up, but some examples (from here, the author claims not to have cherry-picked) are: John S. Watson (promoted up to CEO of Chevron): 6’4” = 193 cm; Tim Cook (promoted up to CEO of Apple): 6’3” = 190 cm; Jeffrey Immelt (promoted up to CEO of General Electric): 6’4” = 193 cm; Mark Zuckerberg (founded Facebook): 5’9” = 175 cm; Larry Page (co-founded Google): 5’11” = 180 cm; Sergey Brin (co-founded Google): 5’8” = 173 cm; Jack Dorsey (co-founded Twitter): 5’11” = 180 cm; Richard Branson (founded Virgin): 5’11” = 180 cm; Elon Musk (quasi-founded Tesla, PayPal, SpaceX): 5’11” = 180 cm; Warren Buffett (quasi-founded Berkshire Hathaway): 5’10” = 178 cm.
The people I instinctively checked after reading this:
- Pichai: 5'11
- Gates: 5'10
- Ballmer: 6'5
- I got conflicting estimates for Jobs and Nadella
I think this is partly cope. Middle management at large companies might have a significant political component but large companies still have much higher labor productivity than small ones, they still represent like a quarter of OECD economic output, and the average middle manager is probably still creating very significant amounts of marginal value despite the political infighting.
Yes, there might be very few middle managers at the top of Forbes' list. But look at millionaires, the people at the top 10% of the wealth distribution in the US. Most middle managers will probably be there, along with other highly paid professionals. And if you found a startup and it fails, you won't make the 10%, which is what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
So purely in terms of wealth and creating value for society, marginal improvements in middle management seem quite valuable. Sure, being a founder might have much higher EV, but also vastly higher variance. And risk aversion is behaviorally indistinguishable from just having a different utility function.
Speaking of which, you might want to be immortal and go to the moon, but most people don't. You could argue that if they'd read the right books or had the right parent/teacher/friend or had more vision, they would also want that, but at that point you're just saying that everyone should be playing the game you like, instead of the one they like.
And I dispute the idea that there's less politics, signaling or strategic/conflictive behavior at the "winner's bracket". Look at Sam Altman, look at the status competitions and fighting for credit in the highest halls of science. Look at states for God's sake. Do you really think Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump or Xi Jinping are not in the winner's bracket, that they will have less real power than the first person to figure out how to solve aging?
Physicists might have found the secret knowledge of how to create nuclear weapons that nobody else had, but after they had the bright idea the bottlenecks were capital, labor, natural resources, and the ability to manage their combination efficiently, and the physicists were not the ones who got to control the weapons in the end.
I think something like your thesis might be true in terms of actually having good counterfactual impact on reality vs merely capturing the resulting wealth, power and prestige, what you call leading the parade. But that doesn't mean that you get to both have the impact and lead the parade by pursuing just the impact part!
I think the good impact vs capturing the results is a really good focus, especially as it relates to the conundrum of the physicists not controlling the weapons they create. I think that generalizes to the problem of knowing which things will go on to be beneficial vs harmful and knowing how to create technology and systems that are robust to downstream tampering that would affect how beneficial vs harmful they are.
As an example, I feel we should have identified the internet and social media as being like public infrastructure and taken steps to make sure they were produced focusing on public good rather than profit. I think many social media companies were founded with public good and pro-social, pro-communication goals, but then once they got bought by profit seeking entities they began to include more an more harmful user lock in, perverse marketing and other similar kinds of issues.
I vaguely appreciate the sentiment but the analogy doesn't sit right with me. In a real tournament, one doesn't just up and choose which bracket to play in - you land in the loser's bracket by losing your first x games. It is right and proper to continue playing in the loser's bracket to the best of your ability.
I think this is almost but not quite exactly right. it is indeed true that many people's ambition is just to climb their local status ladder to a comfortable middle level.
however many of the most successful founders were previously middle-to-high status in some existing company's status ladder. being a middle manager in a big company is strong bayesian evidence that they will be a successful founder. there are way more low status people than high status people inside existing ladders, and there very very few extremely successful founders, so you don't need that many high status extremely successful founders before high status is bayesian evidence for extreme success.
I also think there's some adverse selection / lemon market effect where people who choose to opt out of the existing ladder often do so because they would be unable to win on the existing ladder even if they tried their hardest. in this case, trying to meme your way into countersignalling might be a good strategy. unfortunately, it means that other people have to be very skeptical of countersignallers who haven't demonstrated that they really are in the winner's bracket. I'd guess most examples of people who succeeded after opting out of one status ladder have done something that is legibly high status in some other existing recognized status ladder.
Personal example: back when I was working as a data scientist at various startups, my mother would tell me to wear a suit when interviewing. And I would be like “Mom you do not get it, that would absolutely tank my chances of getting hired except at companies so bad I don’t want to work there, the only people who wear a suit for an interview in tech are the people who don’t think they can cut it on their technical skills and the people hiring know this”. I had the skills. I was definitely playing the winners’ bracket in that particular game. Throwing in something like a suit, the sort of signal used in the losers’ bracket, would have been a terrible move.
This seems more like "your mom is wrong about what the correct interview outfit is" than "you escaped the game". There are lots of outfits that would cost you points in start-up interviews; some people are lucky enough to have their tastes formed by the same pressures and feel like it's natural, others have to learn the same way people have to wear a suit.
Political games can, at best, get stuff from other people. The good stuff - the real power - is the stuff which other people don’t have to offer in the first place. The stuff which nobody is currently capable of doing/making.
Yep.
I think this generalizes to competition against people in general? As in, if you find yourself in a situation where you're competing neck-to-neck with others, with a real possibility of losing, without an unsurpassable lead on them, you should stop that (if you can) and do something else.
Some examples:
- Business. Various standard advice (I believe shared by Graham, Thiel, and Spolsky[1]) regarding building a major business is to start by monopolizing some extremely niche market in which no real competitor exists. Once you've eaten that market, you incrementally expand your niche, always shying away from domains with real competitors until you can crush them (i. e., until they stop being real competitors).
- Physical fights. The best way to deal with someone attacking you is not to be there to begin with (e. g., earn money and move to a safer country/city). Failing that, make yourself urgently not-there by running away (and get good at that, e. g. practice sprinting + parkour). Failing that, bring a (metaphorical or real) gun to a knife fight. "Learn martial arts", on the other hand, is not a good approach.
- War. Maneuver warfare, where you achieve strategic victory by a sequence of precisely planned, decidedly "unfair" tactical operations, is dramatically preferable to direct WW1-style positional-warfare slugfests.
- The post provides plenty of social-conflict examples.
In some way, the point may be obvious. Fair fights against comparably powerful opponents are, by definition, challenging, and also anti-inductive. They drain both sides' resources, force races to the bottom and tons of other negative-sum dynamics, etc. You want either an overwhelming asymmetric advantage, or a fight to which no-one else will show up.
At least, no-one intelligent. Picking a "fight" with Nature, or abstract concepts, is fine. Indeed, those are the kinds of fights you should be picking. Generally speaking, you want to be doing things where success comes from spending ~all of your time thinking about some object-level problem, and ~none of your time keeping tabs on your human adversaries.
Some caveats/clarifications:
- The object-level problem may still involve reasoning about agents, about systems containing people, etc., and even planning against them. What you don't want are symmetric agentic competitors which are doing basically the same thing as you (for appropriate values of "symmetric" and "same thing"). In other words: you want to be the only live player on the board.
- You'd of course still be "technically" in various kinds of competitions: competing in a job market, fighting a war. That's fine, as long as it's not a real competition from your perspective.
- Obviously you may not always have this option available. (Good business ideas may take time to develop, and you need to eat in the meantime. Same for e. g. climbing out of poverty and moving to a safer city.)
Exercise for the reader: evaluate various alignment plans through these lens, and consider how a non-loser's alignment plan ought to look like (and how it ought not to look).
- ^
Not gonna track down exact sources, sorry.
1But my internal reaction is something like “oh god no, I absolutely cannot be seen at an EA global, that would be super cringe”.
I think it's cringe that the cringne-ess is stopping you from going! (Or probably not stopping you from going, since you wouldn't otherwise have any reason to go.)
Yeah from my perspective EAG is a place where a lot of people interested in technical alignment go, to talk to other people interested in technical alignment, about technical alignment stuff.
Meanwhile there are other things happening at EAG too, but you can ignore them. You don’t have to attend the talks, you don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want to talk to. And it’s not terribly expensive, and the location is (often) down the street from you (OP, John).
I wonder whether you’re thinking harder about countersignaling than about what would be object-level good things to do?
Separate from the cringe, I do also see little object-level reason to go, at least for me. The signal to noise ratio at noob-dominated events is pretty bad, EA branding specifically tends to make it worse, and if I'm just going to restrict to people I already know anyway then I can just talk to them outside of such events.
I've gone to two EAGx events and I really liked the focus on making 1 on 1 connections, but you're right that a lot of those connections didn't seem extremely valuable and networking over the internet is probably more likely to find worthwhile people.
This could be good evidence that EA should focus on figuring out more valuable networking strategies for participants. I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit in this regard. Speed meetings with random whoever for example is cool because of the random scrying vibe of it, but it's not good at all for meeting people with specific focuses.
But I think these EA events really are targeting people who are unskilled, unknowledgeable, and just starting out, and trying to get them focused on skilling up and networking in useful directions, in which case I think they are useful events that you have correctly identified as not being useful for you.
Though, I may be playing the loser game in AI Alignment since I'm in the situation where I want to be focusing on AI Alignment / AI notkilleveryone work, and have ideas for directions, but need to eventually be making money to continue working on those directions, so I need to either waste a bunch of time making money doing something else to support my work, or figure out a signal that I can use to communicate to people who can fund my work that my work is worthwhile. I have been trying to focus on what I think is worthwhile and becoming more able to determine what is worthwhile, but honestly I need signals for myself to know whether I'm succeeding or not.
I think there's an interesting dynamic here where epistemic modesty suggests I should pay attention to what other people are focusing on and assume it is worthwhile, which leads to a kind of signalling game. Also, I want to optimize any ideas I am trying to work with and spread for being understandable and appealing to other people, which is another kind of signalling game. The problem is when the object level is getting sacrificed for the signalling. Signalling on it's own is actually extremely valuable.
The way I often model it is that there are people focused on valuable things (object level things). In order to communicate about these valuable things they create jargon, but people who just want to be associated with the valuable thing co-opt that jargon to use in signalling games. This creates a game where the object level people are forced to constantly create new jargon to communicate about the object level thing without that communication getting lost in the noise of the signalling game people who are not actually focused on the object level thing.
Perversely, it is unclear how to distinguish between people who are trying to learn jargon for the sake of status signal games vs people who are trying to learn the jargon out of an interest in the object level but are not yet skilled.
Obviously status game people aren't going to just, tell you they're only pretending to be interested, and I think many people are genuinely unable to distinguish their own motivations. Desire for status is evolutionarily selected for afaik, so I'd expect it to feel like an innate drive rather than something most people are thinking of as a means to an end.
I'm reminded of Things I Learned By Spending Five Thousand Years In An Alternate Universe
If you’re fighting for control of a province, the compromise “your enemy gets an important sounding title like Archduke with almost completely ceremonial powers, and you get a boring sounding title like Undersecretary of Resource Management that controls the place’s economy and military” works a surprising amount of the time.
I think we might actually need more status traps to give status focused people somewhere to go and something to do that at least keeps them out of the way of object level focused people. If the status trap can use status people to produce some value, all the better.
One of the big problems is how to communicate to prospective object level people which things are status traps and which are the real things without communicating it to status gamers who would then probably see "real thing" as high status... but then again, reading dry reports is not glamorous to most people, so maybe making fake status games with the appearance of high status even though they are explicitly fake would be enough for most status gamers.
Of course that assumes there's a fundamental and enduring difference between status and object focused people. If status focused people can learn to be object focused, that would obviously be better. I think EA is doing pretty good at that with the amount they focus on "if you want to be doing charity you need to really really pay attention to and learn about the actual object level effects of what you're doing". If you can make actually trying to engage with the object level an obviously high status thing it may convert status focused people to object focused people, or at least a good approximation, but it might run the risk of causing even more status focused people to cause problems for object focused people. Hard to say.
Yeah, I found this surprisingly focused on social reality given that the just previous sentence was ”The winner’s bracket isn’t focused on signalling games, it’s focused on something more object level.”
If you feel the need to signal how focused on the object level you are, you’re still playing the signaling game.
If you feel the need to signal how focused on the object level you are, you’re still playing the signaling game
Hmm... I feel there are two games here:
(1) People are trying to be seen as important and valuable without actually having done the things that would mark them as actually valuable as a way of cheating the system. This would be like the people who go to university but figure out how to cheat and not actually learn because they want to use the certificate to get a good paying job that they hope will also be fairly easy.
(2) People are trying to send signals to connect with others focused on doing things that they want to be doing. This would be like someone who already learned about a subject but then goes to school to get a certificate to use as social proof that they actually have learned about the subject they are interested in.
I feel like people playing both of these games would be interested in signalling how focused they are on the object level, but they would be doing so for very different reasons and to very different effects.
I'm like "for fuck's sake will you please stop shooting yourself in the foot like a complete fucking dumbass and just do the wholesome thing which is in fact the strategy that will net you the most points here regardless of how much you care about wholesomeness in its own right".
I really like the tangentially expressed vibe of "opt out of 0 sum games and seek positive sum games".
the only people who wear a suit for an interview in tech are the people who don’t think they can cut it on their technical skills and the people hiring know this
I’d bet against this.
Socially clued-in people who have poor technical skills will understand that they should show up in a hoodie to not tank their chances. (Insofar as interviewers are actually selecting in the way you say.)
I bet there will be some brilliant programmers who are so socially clueless that they listens to their mom’s advice and foolishly show up in a suit. (Or immigrants from a country with very different norms in tech, also comes to mind as someone who could get this wrong.)
It’s still plausible that a hoodie is still overall bayesian evidence that someone is good at programming. But I think it’s weaker than you say. And I don’t think it just operates via confidence in technical skills. Eg I think you’re selecting at least as strongly for being very familiar with programmer culture. (Which is evidence of being a good programmer! But evidence of a very similar kind to the way a suit is evidence that someone will be a good lawyer.)
I worked in engineering at Google from 2007-2015. I conducted ... I can't remember, definitely more than 100, maybe something like 200 in-person onsite technical interviews. (In addition to loads of phone screens, but I couldn't see those people.)
Not a single person wore a suit.
If anyone had, I would have been very surprised and I would have immediately started wondering what other memos that candidate had not received.
Like: It doesn’t sound like you were confident enough in your technical skills that you were like ” it doesn’t matter how I dress”, since you thought a suit would tank your chances. Sounds like you understood that it was very important how you dressed for the interview, and that you just knew what the dress code was.
Personal example: back when I was working as a data scientist at various startups, my mother would tell me to wear a suit when interviewing. And I would be like “Mom you do not get it, that would absolutely tank my chances of getting hired except at companies so bad I don’t want to work there, the only people who wear a suit for an interview in tech are the people who don’t think they can cut it on their technical skills and the people hiring know this”. I had the skills. I was definitely playing the winners’ bracket in that particular game. Throwing in something like a suit, the sort of signal used in the losers’ bracket, would have been a terrible move.
But, you regularly wear a suit, just 'cuz you like the aesthetic, right?
Do you make a point to wear jeans and a t-shirt to the interview, and then show up for the first day of work (and all subsequent days) in a black suit and hat?
I don't generally wear a full suit (no button down shirt or tie), but more to the point I have a whole look going on which is pretty clearly not "MBA" or "middle manager" or whatever a suit normally signals.
This is an important bit of clarification! You can do some entertaining countersignaling with a nice suit jacket and an unbuttoned button-down.
This sounds like good advice for people with very high g-factor (i.e. IQ), but I feel like it probably doesn't generalize as g-factor decreases.
I think the theme presented of prioritizing status as a product of quality rather than as a product of signaling mechanisms is a valid one. Though I feel as though in the example of presenting casually in an interview rather than in a suit is just another way of signaling to the interviewer that "I have the skills because I look the part of a data scientist" or "I have the skills because I am not doing level 1 signaling rather I am doing level 2 signalling". If you were to completely avoid signaling your fashion choices would be completely determined by you in which case whether you wore a suit or not would be inconsequential because you are internally not signaling at all because you are "legit". In the same vein I don't think that there are hard lines between the "winners and losers bracket" as proposed. There are useful components from both levels 1 and 2 which can accommodate for both being "legit" and integrating well in society.
I agree that there are not hard lines and what another commenter said about middle management actually producing real value, but I still think there is an interesting and important dynamic being expressed and explored in this post.
I also feel signalling itself is very useful, it's just when it becomes perverse signalling games that it becomes a problem. If you are skilled at focusing on some object level thing, you probably should care about being able to create a clean signal to indicate it, but is that taking part in status games?
I think the interplay between signalling, status focus, and object focus is pretty complicated, but worth exploring and trying to understand better.
It's interesting that this post is framed in terms of status. That seems more like an illustration of the flexibility of what "status" can mean than something essential to the main point of the post.
I could imagine pretty much the same point being made, with most of the same content, without referencing status at all (for a big success don't just join the default competitive arena). Or it could instead be framed as how to be high status, where big success option is the high-status option (climbing the ordinary competitive ladder is upper-middle class at best, actual high status routes around that whole competition).
Within the compressed summary "Status Is The Game Of The Losers' Bracket", a lot of the post's main content winds up within the particular way that the word "status" is being used here.
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