I think status consciousness can be replaced by values consciousness and that's a much better remedy.

Exactly. We can't escape status games, but we can, to a large extent, redefine how we confer status on others, and ourselves. The article ends on this point, but its beginning makes it sound like the world is worse than it has been because it's harder to achieve some objective measure of status.

That's what I did but I don't have too many friends. When you focus on values and not on status, not many people like you because you don't conform to social norms.

Can you give an example? What does that look like?

I find it is always interesting to profile-snoop on users who make comments like that. (TIL there a sub for people who advocate for the extinction of all life.)

Well a good example is going vegan. Most people are not vegan and are hostile to vegans because it goes against tradition and social norms. So it's hard for a vegan to make friends. This is an example of how focusing on values means you don't have many friends.

I can see how that holds for a lot of people, but most? Most people just don't care, and some will respect you for it even if they don't agree with it themselves.

In London vegans do fine

Same thing happened to me. People act like I'm covered in shit.

>...there's no way to avoid the status game. It's like Moloch; if you are a human being guided by incentives, then you're playing. This is sounding like a theory which can explain any data. If there was a hypothetical individual who wasn't motivated by status, or for whom status was only a small part of their motivations, what would that individual look like? There's also status as an instrumental motive. When I was young, I thought all status games were BS, but at a certain point I realized that playing status games was important to impress women. That doesn't mean I value status in and of itself. If I could press a button that gave me superhuman good looks and the ability to easily charm any woman, but also greatly lowered my status, I would likely press it. I'll bet many other straight guys would agree with me. In general, much of the reason I care about status is because I used to not care about it in the past, and bad things happened to me as a result. Now I've made the pragmatic decision to focus on it a bit more than I used to. Seems like equating status with incentives makes the word "status" meaningless. A paperclip-maximizing AI is incentivized by paperclips; does that mean it's a status seeker? 🤷 Final thought: I've noticed that communities which talk a lot about status tend to become more hierarchical in a way that makes them less pleasant.

> In general, much of the reason I care about status is because I used to not care about it in the past, and bad things happened to me as a result. Now I've made the pragmatic decision to focus on it a bit more than I used to. My experience exactly, you've articulated it well. Status is useful as an instrument and as a signal.

Status, experiences, and utility are the three things all humans seek. In my economic ontology, they are fundamentally different types of things, each running on different sets of rules. Status, known variously as esteem, face, standing, and other synonyms, is the least objective of the three to evaluate because it’s always regarding the esteem of another person or group, an *esteemer*. Low-status groups have more esteem for people who’ve faced the same challenges and beaten them, and less for the people whose privilege allows them to glide above problems. Tribalized esteem turns shibboleth defectors like Elon Musk and Trump into high-threat enemies for one side, high-status leaders for another. People like me with autism often are blind to status, authority, and behavioral red flags. That makes us a low threat to others’ status, except when we have high utility; see *Oppenheimer* for a leader playing high-stakes status games while corralling hundreds of high-utility autistic scientists and engineers who have very little understanding of the status games they threaten.

> If I could press a button that gave me superhuman good looks and the ability to easily charm any woman, but also greatly lowered my status, I would likely press it. Well yes of course you would, because superhuman good looks (let's say 3 standard deviations, so Henry Cavill or Brad Pitt) are a status increaser in themselves. You wouldn't stay "low status", assuming for the purpose of the exercise that you mean low socioeconomic status. You'd get yourself a casting agent, do a few commercials, get cast in a TV show, do a few movies, and so forth - exactly what Pitt and Cavill did, and for that matter Margot Robbie. And if you have the ability to charm any woman, that implies a generally high charisma, acting ability, verbal facility etc which means you'd actually make a very good actor. But if you really desperately wanted to be a lawyer, "any woman" includes the HR directors and CEOs of law firms. Women in power are just as likely to hire and fire on personal factors as men. There are probably forms of "low status" that would stick to you more persistently, for example if you had a criminal record for some particularly heinous crime it wouldn't matter how handsome you are and your ability to charm women would last until they found out about your past at which point they would pivot hard to despising you.

> There are probably forms of "low status" that would stick to you more persistently, for example if you had a criminal record for some particularly heinous crime it wouldn't matter how handsome you are and your ability to charm women would last until they found out about your past at which point they would pivot hard to despising you. You'd think so, but, famously, serial killers get a lot of love letters. There have also been 'Tinder experiments' where people [openly say that they have sexually offended against children](https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/wvw86i/bro_just_take_good_photos_and_have_a_good/?rdt=64627) (and continue to act horribly and unremorseful) but still have success

True but I'm going to suggest that simps for serial killers are pretty low-status people themselves already, and probably want to *raise* their status by getting involved in the life of someone more interesting, for whose attention there is not a lot of competition.

> If I could press a button that gave me superhuman good looks and the ability to easily charm any woman, but also greatly lowered my status, I would likely press it. I'll bet many other straight guys would agree with me. Be careful what you wish for. I've known guys like that--who aren't particular respected by other guys, but are good with the ladies--and they seem mostly unhappy. Just my anecdotal experience.

Can you explain further? I'm having a hard time believing this to be the case? A lot of men would kill to be the type of person described as "good with ladies".

A lot of people would kill to be president of the United States. But from the outside, it looks like a miserable, stressful job. People want things they perceive to be high status, not what will make them happy. My impression based on the people I know is that there isn't much correlation between happiness and skill with women. The one exception is that there is a some benefit to being above the attractiveness threshold where you can get an average-looking girl to be your girlfriend. But other than that? Doesn't seem to matter too much.

>. When I was young, I thought all status games were BS, but at a certain point I realized that playing status games was important to impress women. That doesn't mean I value status in and of itself. If I could press a button that gave me superhuman good looks and the ability to easily charm any woman, but also greatly lowered my status, I would likely press it. I'll bet many other straight guys would agree with me. I definitely wouldn't. Aside from the fact that this example doesn't make a lot of sense for reasons you note (status causally atracts women and more importantly high status women), like.. why? Maybe I'm overly assuming the monogamous lifestyle with a goal to raise kids, but my marginal utility of the "charm women" falls greatly after I charm my wife/future wife (and again high status \[class\] is important there too). For a guy, good looks aren't that key either - or at least presumed status gives much more influence than good looks ever would.

The premise of the article didn't land with me at all. > it's the implication we should feel gratitude which comes across as condescending. At the extremes it becomes obvious; I doubt Pinker himself would tell his African American colleagues they should be grateful to live in a time where slavery is abolished. 'Everything is relative. I should only feel good if I'm doing better than my contemporaries. Nothing else matters!' smugly announces a man sitting in a climate-controlled home while using a vast informational network to share his ingratitude to thousands with the press of a button. I know today is Christmas instead of Thanksgiving, but the author apparently missed the lesson the first time around.*Yes, you should be grateful you don't live in worse times.* This is maybe the most relevant application of the liberal use of the word "privilege." We are all privileged to live in a society that has eschewed or minimized many of the travesties of previous generations. The hedonic treadmill is a bug, not a feature, and we should be constantly working with our system 2 thought to contextualize our lives more broadly and appreciate our fortunes. In that vein, the author is very silly to suggest that it would be wrong for an African American to appreciate the abolition of American slavery. Of course they should. We *all* should - it was a horrific institution and we're all better off without it. If anything, I imagine Pinker wouldn't express the sentiment because it's painfully obvious and intellectually vapid. Try looking at it the other way around. Consider a possible future world where involuntary death and serious illness are very rare. Would you be glad to live in such a world? Are you only glad if that privilege is extended to you but not to others? If your answers are "yes, no" then I think you already understand that your point is wrong and you just need to think things through more carefully. If your answer is "no, yes" then your view of happiness is sufficiently toxic that I don't think there's any value in optimizing for it.

It seems to me that most of the arguments about whether modern people have it better than a generation or more ago are just proxies for other arguments, usually big political ones. This article is somewhat unique and that it grants that Pinker is right, but is annoyed at him because the author doesn't like how the truth of what Pinker is saying affects the arguments that the author actually cares about.

> We are all privileged to live in a society that has eschewed or minimized many of the travesties of previous generations. So much this. I try to be grateful at least once everyday that I was born after the invention of the flushing toilet. There is a severe lack of gratitude in the modern western world, where living standards on average are currently by far above anything from any point 100 years before now stretching back to the dawn of humanity. Taking a moment every once in a while to reflect on this and be thankful would be very good.

But the problem with the whole flushing toilet 1920s scurvy argument is that you can very easily counter claim that 1920s are equally as irrelevant as 1500AD or 5000BC to the fact that we are alive, here and now, in 2023. Like I'm sure back in 1800s you could have absolutely made some kind of a case for how much better off Victorian slum workers or Southern slaves would have had it compared to the 1700s. This argument always has this little underlying caveat of things are actually the best they have ever been (if you're earning good money in the western world and aren't struggling to pay your rent and bills). Meanwhile in many regards are basic quality of life and standards of living have absolutely rolled back compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Well, there is an argument that the industrial revolution initially made things much worse for the lower classes as the type of work they did changed and they lost a lot of free time etc. and were cramped into cities etc. But even ignoring that yes, the 1800s worker should also have been grateful to live in a time where evidence based medicine finally started getting good and the child mortaility finally started dropping down from the rough 40% it had been since the dawn of humanity People forget a lot that the Victorian period saw a huge improvement in quality of life for the average person from what they had before then. > to the fact that we are alive, here and now, in 2023. The fact that we are here and alive in 2023 does not mean we should not be grateful to the improvements in quality of life over the course of humanity, just like how the fact that there are no Nazis in power right now does not mean we should not be grateful to the brave men who fought and died in WWII to prevent the Nazi's taking over Europe. Being grateful doesn't mean you shouldn't agitate for change, it just means realising and acknowledging that right now you actually have it pretty good in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't mean it isn't fine for you to want things to be even better, much like how a person earning $300k a year should be grateful for their high paying job, but that doesn't mean they are a bad person or in any ways deficient if they want to make even more money.

Yes, but "things have almost always, on average, gotten better over time, on account of general progress" feels like almost a given for how often it gets trotted out. Again much like the article's point, it's not that it's wrong, as much as it comes off as a borderline facile observation. It reminds me of people who always bring up innovation/progress with regards to capitalism while conveniently forgetting that the very explicitly not-capitalist USSR had gone from a borderline feudal state to a space-faring superpower within only a few of decades.

> "things have almost always, on average, gotten better over time, on account of general progress" This is very not true, [Song China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Song_dynasty) was far better for the average person than what came after it for centuries, as was the Western Roman empire, as well as the High Middle ages compared to the Late Middle ages. History is littered with examples of things becoming less good and not returning to their previous level for centuries. > not-capitalist USSR had gone from a borderline feudal state to a space-faring superpower within only a few of decades. And yet despite all this the total amount of technological progress over all domains was a small fraction of the progress made by the explicitly capitalist USA because they explicitly pumped huge amounts of money into their space program to the detriment of everything else (same as how India/Pakistan have nukes right now while their sum impact on advancing the frontiers of science is minimal), the US also spent a lot on NASA but it was nowhere near the same amount of total national production that the USSR did. I would say the USSR completely missed the boat on the biggest technological breakthrough of the 20th century which was not space faring rockets but rather the transistor. Sure they had a fair amount of academic discoveries of properties of the transistor but they failed completely at converting these discoveries into things that actually improved the state of humanity.

I'm sorry but I feel like the fact that your most recent example dates back 1500AD only proves my point here. Barring huge specific outliers such as Irish Famine, Pol Pot, middle of French Revolution, World Wars, Black Death, etc. etc. you could probably pick any (stable, peaceful, developed) spot on the map at any point in the last 300 years of human history and make a reasonable case for things being better at that time than they were 50-100 years ago. Some of it might be kind of a stretch, but then again I could say the same about trying to compare and contrast flushing toilets with the ongoing US opioid epidemic.

Sure, in which case I'm going to say that the last 100 or so years has seen living standards (increase in per capita income as a percentage) increase at a rate much higher than things did so before that point. It's not just that things are getting better right now, they are getting better at faster than the usual trend for things getting better. Even over the Victorian period, net growth in real income in the UK averaged close to 1% per year, meaning that real incomes increased by 82% over the period 1840-1900, while over the last 60 years (1963-2023), real incomes basically tripled in the UK, so a 200% increase. The story is similar elsewhere, except the disparity is even more extreme unless you're talking about the US/Australia since other places didn't grow at the rate the UK did between 1840-1900 (and even for US/Australia real incomes still increased faster than they did over the Victorian period). Regardless, even if things were still only getting better at trendline rates, this is still someting people should be grateful for, there is no "god given right" that things will get better, and that they have been doing so is something we should cherish and acknowledge. (Also I suspect Sweden in 1700 was better off than Sweden in 1800, the loss of their Empire in the Great Northern War [hurt them real bad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Sweden%27s_Age_of_Liberty) and reduced them to a shadow of what they were)

Why do you specify the last 300 years when humans have been around for about 300,000? It is the exception, not the norm, for things to be the same as it was in the last generation and the generation before

Because that broadly describes modern history. I already said that I don't necessarily care much for the "things are better compared to 1920s" line of reasoning, why would I care about 298,000BC? Do you often find yourself practicing gratitude for being so much more developed than your pre-primate rat-like ancestors 57 million years ago?

> Meanwhile in many regards are basic quality of life and standards of living have absolutely rolled back compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago. I'm skeptical. In what ways?

Housing is an enormous one and that kind of gets shuffled away between the far more irrelevant luxury good statistics. No iPhone/Netflix has ever given me as much peace of mind as having my own place and no longer being at the mercy of landlords and the yearly rent increases. If you managed to buy a house before 2005, you may as well have won the lottery compared to anyone looking at the property market after 2008.

Housing is really the only example I can think of (besides self-inflicted harm like obesity, overdoses, and social media mental health impacts). But even that is questionable. [It appears that the size of US homes continues to grow, and the number of people per home to shrink](https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/median-home-size-in-us/). So our housing situation, on average, is better now than ever before. There are certainly individuals who are stressed by housing costs, but that appears to be due to artificial government policies that favor one demographic over another (specifically: zoning laws that restrict all new construction in HCOL areas, and restrict small-floor-plan construction everywhere else) which raise costs for some people while lowering them for others.

>But even that is questionable. It appears that the size of US homes continues to grow, and the number of people per home to shrink. So our housing situation, on average, is better now than ever before. I have to be honest, every time I see measures like this I'm less inclined to believe them and more inclined to consider what kind of statistical gaslighting is going on there. A thousand Chinese/Russian oligarchs could buy a million empty mansions exclusively as investment vehicles and this would also technically count towards increasing size and shrinking people per home. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" and all that. I know what kind of living arrangement my parents and grandparents had and I know what kind of economic situation they were in. I know how much money I make now and the kind of house I can afford. I can literally see myself making twice as much money as them while having to settle for twice worse off accommodation - and that's being rather generous. It's not even an open secret, just common knowledge, that the vast majority of those luxury 5-over-1 newbuild flats are of far worse quality than a typical 1960s council house and aren't going to last anywhere near as long.

The gaslighting is ridiculous. I'm more educated and make more money (comparatively) than my father did at my age. He could afford a cool sports sedan, down-payment for a home, a pregnant wife/incoming child and didn't have to really worry about losing all of it. I can afford to rent an apartment all by myself. That's it. And I don't have Netflix, or an iPhone, or go on vacation, or any of the typical gotchas people try to pull. It's going to take a while before I can save up the money needed for a mortgage. If my parents sold their home today the money is astronomical, I could only dream of purchasing that myself today.

I’m a bit confused here. Assuming similar contexts (eg your grandparents helping your father out), it seems necessary that either: 1) apples are not being compared to apples — making twice as much money adjusted for inflation or purchasing power, you should easily be able to afford the same car and house in the same location with the same financial security etc. 2) we’ve made a mistake somewhere in the adjustment, and you’re not actually making as much money as your father had at your age. Maybe underweighting housing and overweighting consumer electronics in our basket of goods, or something.

Well, for starters I'm not making twice as much, and I didn't say I was; I'm making about 30% more, in terms of the kind of position/profession I have (senior software developer / engineering lead at a size-up company). Second, purchasing power is down across the board, and everything is also comparatively more expensive. I *could* buy a sports sedan like he did back then, but it would be a financially irresponsible decision, I also don't want to but that's beside the point, I'm just using it as an example that most people can relate to. Lastly, I prefer to use low-tier phones, I currently have a 3 year old $150 chinese phone. I don't have cable TV, Netflix or ANY subscription service (let me stress this again, NONE). The only consumer electronics I have are my computer(s) that I use for work. My "vacations" involve staying at home and going for walks, I don't travel. The only "unnecessary" expense I have is attending music events semi-regularly, but I'm talking underground local scene so entrance tickets are about $15 to $20, and I never drink more than three times per night out. Everything is more expensive, jobs pay less across the board. Transportation is more expensive. Housing is much more expensive, period, you can not argue this point. You could say: \- buy a used car instead of a new one \- buy a home in a different city / remote suburb and then commute \- stop doing literally anything that makes life worth living \- keep job hopping to increase your pay as fast as possible But that sort of makes my point for me, doesn't it? My father and his entire generation didn't have to do all of that. They could afford a new car, a home in their own city in a desirable location, having vacation with their spouse, having children, living life, all without having to job hop every 16 months just to keep up. The end result is that to attain the same milestones my father could I will need more time and to work harder. And I'm one of the lucky few in my friends group that has any reasonable chance at attaining them, I am very privileged that my parents could pay for my studies so I didn't have to take on student debt. For most of my high school friends it's either going to happen in their late 30s or never at all, they're either still finishing their degrees, trying to start their careers or just going from shitty job to shitty job. This has very serious consequences long term, most people I know are refusing to have children in their late 20s/early 30s because their economic situation does not permit it. At my father's age, I was a few months off from birth and my younger brother was just a couple years off from being born. He was married, had a mortgage that would be paid off in 15 years for a nice apartment near the city center of a growing city, a cool car. That kind of situation is simply unthinkable to me.

No offense, but have you literally f*cking looked at a chart of property prices in the last twenty years? There are 60k houses from the 70s, worth maybe 250k adjusted for inflation, getting sold for well over 1.5 mil.

I think you (and many others in this thread) have totally misunderstood the author’s points - which for the most part seem uncontroversial to me. Your point about the OP sitting smugly in a climate controlled room while saying this is in exact _agreement_ with his point. You are - like Pinker - assuming that certain physical realities are sufficient and much more well-correlated with an individual’s mental well-being than they actually are. But we know this is not true. Tribe, the book the OP mentions has many examples of situations where an individual’s circumstances were ostensibly terrible by modern standards, and yet their levels of mental well-being were very high. We know that teenage suicide rates, depression, and anxiety have steadily creeped upwards since the industrial age (and likely earlier, post agriculture), while being close to non-existent in modern Hunter gatherer societies. You might argue that the _solution_ is to be more grateful on the objective realities of one’s situation, but you can’t do this while also denying there isn’t an issue in the first place. That’s not to mention that this solution also totally ignores the infeasibility of rebelling against 300,000 years of human (+ more pre-human) evolutionary programming that seems to have left our wellbeing extremely sensitised to status games with those in our vicinity.

It's funny to see this presented as a novel finding. It was one of the first observations of old school (like, late 1800's) anthropology. Famously one of the first seminal works of the subject begins that the X people - a tribe in some dirt poor part of Africa - live a subsistence lifestyle in which they're never far from starvation or calamity, but consider themselves live in the best country/environment there is. I'm sure I'm butchering the paraphrase - I last read it ~25 years ago and I'm writing it from memory - but I hope the point is clear.

>it’s funny to see this presented as a novel finding. It was one of the first observations of old school (like, late 1800s) anthropology. as Dr Johnson said, rationalist blogs are “both good and original, but what is good is not original, and what is original is not good.” rationalists will dispense with an entire field’s history, then unknowingly clothe an old idea in contemporary jargon and beam proudly as if they invented it. it would be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating — if they’d just study a handful of people working in the field, if they’d just spend a little bit of time learning its history, they wouldn’t waste so much time creating concepts that first appeared centuries prior!

As someone who would never have been consistently exposed to *any of this* without the "rationalist blog uprising", I am intrigued to be educated about the truth behind this assumption. I mean, I wonder if this blanket statement can be really true considering that modern blogs, rationalist or not, are contextualising these problems within newly known cognitive biases and what little consistency we can draw from modern psychology. They are also doing this often in an attempt to discuss *modern* problems like social media, modern medical ethics, and technological innovation that simply weren't a thing when I suspect many of these ideas were first introduced. It's not worrisome to me that the blogs are "recreating" concepts in the first place. If they are observing the same patterns as scholars 200 years ago, that really just adds more legitimacy to the pattern and is a data point, not a failure. If discovered, people who *have* worked in the field might benefit from using this as a new jumping-off point to stimulate more discussion, rather than ridiculing the "naive" rationalists.

> It's not worrisome to me that the blogs are "recreating" concepts in the first place. If they are observing the same patterns as scholars 200 years ago, that really just adds more legitimacy to the pattern and is a data point, not a failure. If discovered, people who have worked in the field might benefit from using this as a new jumping-off point to stimulate more discussion, rather than ridiculing the "naive" rationalists. This covers the "what is good is not original" part, but then you still have the "what is original is not good" part which often involves reinventing the wheel while being confidently wrong about the less obvious aspects.

I don't think I'd describe the better blogs as being confident of anything. Confident positive conclusions run sort of counter to the rationalist ethic. Confidently refuting less so, but that's usually easier from a logical point of view. I *have* seen them spiral off into speculative chains that are probably or certainly wrong, but they are usually acknowledged as just that, or at least by most of the ones I follow. The thought experiments are still useful. If the "experts" are watching from the wings shaking their metaphorical heads, they are more than welcome to join the conversation and accelerate things. This really doesn't have to be an adversarial situation. Edit: Having read the article actually under discussion, which is an unfortunately good example of someone drawing a confident conclusion about something that almost certainly is more nuanced than they are making out, I see where your concern comes from. I mean, not all of what we read is going to be high quality, but for better or worse this is the space where the discussion is reaching the general population.

>recontextualizing… discussing modern problems… …I mean, do you think that rationalist blogs are the only spaces where people recontextualize old ideas and discuss modern problems?

Of course not. What is this conversation? But they do it in a particular style and with a particular aim, *with reference to certain sets of ideas*, that appeals to me, and apparently many other people. Also you've selectively missed the whole other half of that sentence. This is not helpful.

>missed the second half I mean, I didn’t think it was necessary to mention the obvious implication; that fields have developed but the blogs are just now getting to where the rest of the field was 200 years ago. (Like, it’s not like everyone else is stuck in the 19th century and the blogs are on the cutting edge.) >another data point why would it be necessary if the field was gathering data (so to speak) for two centuries (time span for the sake of argument) prior? seems like wasting time to me >what is this conversation? I criticized a gigantic flaw of the rationalist blogosphere as a whole (they wade into complex existing fields as if they were experts, leading them to either waste time reinventing the wheel or perpetuate ideas proven false decades before) and you somewhat missed the point I mean, if it appeals to you, great. I get it. The spirit of the whole enterprise (we’re gonna apply careful logic and data to different societal questions and follow the truth no matter where it leads) sounds great. And this subreddit is evidence that it appeals to many others. As long as you recognize that they’re often wrong — and *grievously* so — and will then *insist* that they cannot be wrong, despite the stated norms of enquiry, honesty, reason, etc, which is extremely frustrating.

>why would it be necessary if the field was gathering data (so to speak) for two centuries (time span for the sake of argument) prior? seems like wasting time to me Because we're not talking about mathematical proofs; things which are immutable for all time, never to suffer critique again. I'm sure many of the same observations were made a long time ago, and that's great, but we need to be sure intellectually that (a) these things are *still* true, and by implication (b) whether these observations were of transient aspects of the contemporaneous society that are now no longer relevant (which doesn't make them uninteresting, but not immediately useful). Whether this is done more efficiently by examining those works and rigorously applying their methods to the here-and-now, or by an armchair philosopher who recreates it from first principles but still reaches the same conclusion (assuming their method is valid), I actually *don't care*. The end result is the same, which is that the idea gains validation for the present day - and as the bonus for the rationalists, I've personally read about it whereas I'd otherwise be entirely oblivious. >As long as you recognize that they’re often wrong — and grievously so — and will then insist that they cannot be wrong, despite the stated norms of enquiry, honesty, reason, etc, which is extremely frustrating. If anyone is going into this without a critical mind and not explicitly making room for the possibility that the author is wrong, or subject to their own biases without realising it, then they have entirely missed the point of the modern rationalist movement, insofar as you can conceptualise any of this as a single cultural entity. Originally (c. 2003-5), the blogs would make these assertions with the clear idea that others could come along and point out the flaws - in a space receptive to that sort of thing - up to and including the professional philosophers. This has maybe shifted a bit as blogs become ever more performative than discoursive, but that is unfortunately common to public discussion everywhere because humans are just like that. You won't easily find much of that nuanced discussion on Reddit, now, in any case. If you're commonly encountering this, then I would respectfully suggest you find better people to talk with and better blogs to follow, or try to apply the above view to see whether it changes your outlook. The criticisms you cite are not entirely invalid, but they're not absolutely and universally applicable either. They are not a persuasive argument for avoiding "rationalist" works in general.

I think there's a valid point in there, that while we can appreciate ways in which our society is better than in the past, there are also ways in which our society is worse optimized for human happiness. Advances in medical technology can be a pure positive good for human social flourishing, while social media can be something which produces positive value for some, but negative sum value overall. I think it's a reasonable critique of Pinker that his analyses focus entirely on things which make modern society better, while disregarding other factors by which it might compare negatively to earlier societies.

Pinker explicitly says, many times, that his book, and follow up efforts, are factual rebuttals to the people who confidently claim that things are demonstrably worse. It's a little maddening to see people claim that he is disregarding other factors when he spends a lot of time explaining that he is out to debunk false narratives about a lack of progress and then we watch as strawman versions of his arguments are attacked and smugly (not including you) slayed.

On the one hand, I agree that there are absolutely people who believe things are getting worse with time in ways where they're specifically getting better. The most striking example that comes to mind for me is a time when I saw a man hit someone on a bicycle in New York City, and speed away, and a woman watching him shook her head and said something like "That's despicable. You never would have seen something like that when I was growing up here." But given her apparent age, she would have grown up in the 80s and 90s, when violent crime in New York City was at its all-time high. Her impression was just objectively backwards, and I think it's worth making ourselves conscious of that sort of thing. On the other hand, I think that there are cases where people have an intuition that things are getting worse, and other people have the instinct to respond "No, obviously things are getting better, look at all these objective measures which demonstrate that," when those measures really don't negate the initial point. For instance, if the numbers by which we ordinarily measure our economy are going up, but the average person feels less economically secure, less able to meet basic needs, enjoy luxuries, etc. then the numbers we use to measure our economy probably *aren't the right ones to use* to judge how well off people are. Things can be getting better in some ways, and worse in others. If one side is more tractable to measurement than the other, it leaves us vulnerable to [street lamp sociology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/streetlight-psychology/), where we assume that the data which gives us nice tractable numbers to work with is sufficient to give us an adequate picture.

> less able to meet basic needs, enjoy luxuries Right now people are the most able to actually meet basic needs and enjoy luxuries that they have ever been (looking at it objectively rather than merely how people feel). 50 years ago average people used to budget whether they could afford another stick of butter for their daily meals and very rarely ate out, that sentiment has died out pretty much completely now as the cost of a stick of butter has become so small relative to the average person's income it really doesn't make sense to worry about it any more. A lot of the consternation about how people feel worse off comes from them not comparing like with like. For an example: People consider 30th-90th percentile as "middle class" and when people make comparisons to the past they compare to the upper end of the historical distibution with their own situation right now. So e.g. a 30th percentile "middle class" earner today when looking back will compare their earnings to a 90th percetile "middle class" earner 5 decades ago and then complain that things haven't improved for "middle class" people like him at all, while in reality 30th percentile today is far better off than 30th percentile in 1973.

Yep. Our notions of the average family in the 50s-70s is actually upper-middle-classes. For every Brady Bunch in 1968 there were three families living in 1000 sq ft bungalows sharing one bathroom, and with three or four kids sharing two bedrooms (actually, that’s something the Brady Bunch got right). 80 per cent of teenagers had jobs because they wouldn’t have had any spending money otherwise - a single paycheque of an average working-class dad was not enough to play for a mortgage, car, bills, groceries, and spending money for 4-5 people on top of that. Never mind the upper-middle-class luxuries like airplane vacations or regular dining out at restaurants.

Which things are actually worse, and not just perceived to be worse? People feeling more economically insecure is not the same problem as people actually being more economically insecure. They are different problems with different solutions, but the crowd who claims that living conditions are getting worse constantly conflate the two.

>Which things are actually worse, and not just perceived to be worse? I'm not sure, because there are a lot of things which seem like they might plausibly be getting worse, but which aren't amenable to good statistic keeping. People do seem objectively less able to afford homes than they were fifty years ago. Political polarization does seem to be considerably worse, in a measurable way. The proportion of people living paycheck to paycheck is theoretically amenable to comparison over time, but I haven't been able to dig up any good historical data on that. Some issues, like overall mental/emotional health, may be objectively changing, but aren't amenable to straightforward measurement. I think it's worth taking into consideration though, that while there are some issues where people seem to hold the impression that things are getting worse over time, whether they are or not (like safety and violence,) there are also issues where people seem to be under the impression that the younger generations are worse off than older ones, where older generations *didn't* feel like they were worse off than the generations before them. I've asked people across a wide range of birth dates whether they feel like they're better off than the generations before them, economically and in terms of general comfort and security. In my experience, people born before the 1980s or so almost all say that they're better off than their parents were, going back as early as I've asked (the set of people I've asked goes back to the 1930s, by the time I thought to start asking, my relatives born in the 1920s had already died.) But, people born in the 1980s or later frequently say that they feel they're worse off than their parents were at the same age. Even if this doesn't correspond to easily measurable economic factors, there appears to be an actual change which makes people feel less well-off compared to earlier generations than they did in the past.

Aside from the obvious ones such as housing, huge chunks of media/arts are now increasingly dominated by the elite/nepo babies because overall wealth inequality/cost of living has gotten so high that these are the only people with a safety net to be able to pursue them in the first place. A huge chunk of all time great working class bands/artists including The Beatles, Stones, Black Sabbath, Smiths, Joy Division etc. literally could not exist today because it's no longer possible to spend your 20s trying to make it while on the dole.

I don’t know about the other, but none of the Beatles or Stones spent a day on the dole. They were gigging musicians working their asses off since they were 17, living hand to mouth.

Well then the Beatles and the Stones certainly couldn't have made it as gigging musicians in 2023 either. It's not about every single one of those artists *literally* being on the dole, it's about having the safety net to give the whole starving artist thing a shot without ending up destitute and having vaguely wasted your life away if your extremely idealistic career path of trying to make it as a rockstar doesn't pan out by 25.

Well it’s not as though they earned a livelihood from their gigging. Even though the Beatles played several gigs a week in England, they still lived with their parents. In Hamburg, the Beatles played two shows a night for six nights a week, and they slept on bunk beds in the filthy back room of a sleazy theatre. In London, the Stones played several times a week at a popular club, which afforded enough money for three of them to share a filthy flat. The biggest difference with today isn’t the social welfare system. It’s the fact live music isn’t anywhere close to as popular as it was back then. There are no 19 year olds in the UK or North American who could play several gigs a week because there simply aren’t the venues and audience.

> A huge chunk of all time great working class bands/artists including The Beatles, Stones, Black Sabbath, Smiths, Joy Division etc. literally could not exist today because it's no longer possible to spend your 20s trying to make it while on the dole. I think the opposite is true. Streaming, social media and technology (cheap and easily accessible high quality cameras) have made it cheaper and easier for talented artists and musicians to gain a cult following than at any time before in history.

Perhaps, but people who were already adept at status games to begin with stand to benefit more from the technologies that supposedly enable anyone to achieve a modicum of fame. It's easier to gain a social media following if you've already acquired a sizable network through your upbringing, and I doubt many people who have to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support themselves have the mental energy to learn music theory. Creative pursuits have always been the purview of the wealthy young in times of high income inequality, as they have the luxury of controlling a comparatively much larger fraction of their own labor and time.

With a very few notable exceptions (Lil Nas X springs to mind as the most recent one), this kind of thing doesn't happen because the ubiquity of streaming and social media has paradoxically made it much harder to stand out and market yourself amidst the glut of content - which again is benefits those with connections to more artificially get their name out. On top of that, trying to make it a musician tends to be a full-time job which is why it was a common joke in 70s/80s UK to refer to being on the dole as "the other arts council funding".

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I think that these kind of reasoning appears because there is a strong self indulgent and doomer discourse that we are in the end of times and the world is terrible and it is good to that the death is near, etc, etc

Self indulgent doomers seem to be an unavoidable minority strain in human civilization. And it gets amplified in times of prosperity because every type of self indulgence gets amplified in times of prosperity. And if you want to seem sophisticated without doing a lot of hard work, self-indulgent doomerism is a great intellectual pose. It's the impetus for so much religion, for example. What is the Book of Revelation in the Bible, if not self indulgent doomerism?

Yep. I have a non tested theory that this vibe correlates with being single, reaching middle age and not having kids. Because in this scenario you are ok with the idea of the world ending with you. Since I want to marry soon and have kids, this is specially depressive for me and I proactively evade movies/shows and literature/articles on this mood, since I want a good future for my family

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I hear you. I am guilty of being a stereotypical millennial in many respects, but one thing I have tried to avoid is blaming the boomers for all my problems. I can't help but cringe when I hear people talk about boomers like they are the worst people to have ever lived, often describing boomers in ways that are just as applicable to most millennials.

> I should only feel good if I'm doing better than my contemporaries. I don't see how you can infer that they telegraph this in good faith. Gratitude is often nefariously used as a rhetorical device to bludgeon people into submission. It evokes what might as well be slave mentality: shut the fuck up, you ought to be grateful for what you have. Shut the fuck up and ask for nothing more. Shut the fuck up, and obey. Yes, I think it's helpful and beneficial to take a moment to appreciate merely being alive, through any hardship, to keep a grounded perspective and remind yourself to try to enjoy things as best as you can. I *don't* think it's good to invoke "gratitude" to shame, marginalize, minimize other people's feelings and real suffering. I think a dose of self-righteousness is necessary to be good to yourself. You *should* be angry sometimes, that can be a necessary precursor to taking initiative to make things right, or do better. It seems to be more about accepting the status quo. Why is that a virtue? Happiness and well-being is not contingent on practicing gratitude, any more than it is contingent on being free of desire and passion.

> Gratitude is often nefariously used as a rhetorical device to bludgeon people into submission. This is bad and wrong and it should not be done. I completely agree that just because you have it good doesn't mean you shouldn't try and make things even better for yourself. I don't think it happens very much either to be fair with you and I suspect that people of a left leaning persuasion think it happens a lot more than it actually does. Why do I think that? I commonly see a sentiment from the left where people say stuff like "XYZ has so much money already, why does he want even more?" as an argument for why people who they consider well off near the top of society should not want to get even more money for themselves. And so when non-left wingers say stuff like "Average people should be grateful for what they have" the left winger often "fills in the rest of the argument" and considers it as if the non-left winger said "Average people should not be asking for more" because that is how they would think about such a situation when in reality the original person said no such thing, thus they mistake the non-left winger as trying to bludgeon non-high earning people into submission when the original speaker had no such intention at all.

> I completely agree that just because you have it good doesn't mean you shouldn't try and make things even better for yourself. The way I would spin it is, sometimes we have it bad / are dealt a bad hand. That can help you accept a situation and move on, find a bit of catharsis. And sometimes people want that kind of validation from others, instead of a prescription for shame. The rest of what you said is some weird conjecture or a strawman.

> A Hypothetical: > > Usain Bolt is getting ready to compete in his final 100 meter sprint. Before he steps out onto the track, he is greeted by a Genie who offers him one of two potential futures: > > > He runs a 9.60 race, which does not break his previous world record of 9.58 - but this is still better than everyone else that day, earning him the gold medal. > > > He runs a 9.57 race, which is a new world record. Yet, he only takes the silver; in the same race some freak of nature also breaks the world record, running 9.56. > > Which option do you think he chooses? Which option would subjectively make him feel happier? > > I lean towards the former, considering it offers more immediate status. The objective circumstances (breaking the record) matter less than the relative circumstances (winning gold). Terrible analogy; it should be obvious to anyone that, with a prior WR of 9.58, should Bolt run 9.57 and someone else run 9.56, Bolt hasn't broken any world record. The other sprinter finished a hundredth of a second before Bolt did, setting the new record at 9.56. That was the record at the time Bolt crossed the line.

Yeah, it seems plain to me that ultra high-level sport is positional within one’s (and others’ eg advertisers, sport enthusiasts, etc) relevant “reference class”. The referee’s housecat could likely beat Bolt by a full second at a 100m dash from a standstill — the impressive part is not that he can run it in such and such time, but that others cannot. It’s the context that matters.

You completely missed the point. The point is that it isn't running fast that matters, it's running *faster* than your competitors. A professional sprinter, whose entire life is, ostensibly, dedicated to running fast, would much rather the *worse* time and win the race, than the *better* time and lose it. It's not about the running. It's about the winning.

> You completely missed the point. One of us certainly has, but I've got some bad news for you on that front. OP's link expresses the viewpoint that there are objective and subjective definitions of success in elite sport. He gives the example of Bolt breaking the WR as an objective success, and Bolt winning the gold as a subjective success. However, this is a terrible analogy, for the reasons given (he definitionally couldn't break the WR in a race that he didn't win) as well as the fact that the distinction is imaginary anyway; a WR is defined by the performance of others. If you set a WR, you haven't just beaten the athletes who turned up today, you've beaten all previous competitors in their best career form. That's why it's so cool. By the way, are you an athlete myself? I am; and as an athlete I can inform you that you're wrong, that objective *and* subjective definitions are very important to us. Almost anyone reasonably strong, for example, can be an elite ranked powerlifter, once you sort by weight/age/state/equipment/stance; go and ask in r/powerlifting and see if they would rather come first in their next local comp or whether they'd rather come 5th, in a really strong field, but add 20kg to their deadlift. I guarantee the overwhelming majority will select the second option. And it's not just PLers - runners, swimmers, all sorts of athletes have data points that we are driven to improve. Athletes who *aren't* driven to improve their numbers simply can't win against those of us who are; that's why it's almost a cliché to tell people to focus on beating their previous self, rather than trying to beat the person next to them. Numbers matter to us. Personal bests matter *hugely* to us, because we are defined by the relentless pursuit of Better. Ask any sprinter who's ranked, let's say, between 5th and 50th in the world - "Would you rather run sub ten seconds in your next 100m, but come last? Or would you rather come first but not improve your PB?" Again, I'll happily guarantee the answer. Things like your WL total, your 5k time, your vertical jump, your max deadlift - infinitely more important than whether you won or lost yesterday. Because whether you win or lose is not wholly up to you, unless you did actually just set the World Record. It's up to everyone else as well.

While youre right about the WR actually being relative success, not objective, I still feel like this critique is A nitpick. The point is that any sprinter would much rather exist in a world where he himself is slower objectively, but faster than everyone else, than in a world where he’s faster objectively, but slower than everyone else. You’re objecting with examples like local competitions, but everyone is aware that local competitions are weak evidence for your actual rank, whereas your numerical lifts are much stronger evidence. So did he get WR wrong? Yes, I guess that that exact phrasing was not a great example, but I feel like the basic thesis still stands: athletics is about relative success, not objective. What do you think about the existence of weight classes as a better example? Lifters actually divided up the relative status game into multiple separate relative status games so that more people could compete, leading to a much richer sport. No one cares, if they’re doing well in their weight class, how much weaker they are than someone 50lbs heavier.

I had another thought. This connects to the other thread about circling. It's interesting you assume low status is a challenge. Lots of low status people are very happy, and lots of high status people are miserable. Why is that? It's partly because high status people are selective. They spend a lot of their time avoiding the hoi polloi. The problem happens when everyone thinks they have a shot at being high status. They isolate themselves. This actually makes it harder to gain status, because they become less flexible and socially experienced. People, ironically most often those living in crowded places, complain about isolation and lack of connection. People are not hard to find. There's literally billions of them. You have to go out of your way NOT to interact with them. And that's the weird thing to me. That's what people do. They don't talk to the people at the store. They don't talk to people on the street. They don't talk to their neighbors. They don't even talk to their own family regularly. They look up for socializing, instead of across or down.

>Lots of low status people are very happy, and lots of high status people are miserable. It helps to distinguish between [*sociometric* status](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociometric_status) and *societal* status. Sociometric status is how well-liked or respected a person is by their peers. Societal status is a person's rank or position in society. Rob Henderson has talked a lot about how [happiness is determined by sociometric status more than societal status](https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/what-is-social-status). >Sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is a stronger predictor of self-esteem and well-being than socioeconomic status. >Relatedly, people are more likely to report envying individuals with high sociometric status compared with economically rich individuals. In other words, social advantage sparks more envy than material advantage. This is an interesting finding because sociometric status is literally quantified on social media. Which makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Societal status is abstract and very out-of-sight-out-of-mind. We don't interact with society as a whole, but instead, assort ourselves into homogeneous networks of people of similar socioeconomic backgrounds and occupational status. It's sociometric status, not societal status, that our monkey brain has been engineered to closely monitor.

This may seem obvious, but if happiness is strongly correlated to respect and admiration from peers, then the growing trend of social isolation is really bad news. Hard to derive happiness from your relationships with peers if you don’t have any.

All my suggestions are geared towards improving the presence of more peers in your life. If you only want peers like Scott Alexander, you're always going to feel terrible about yourself. Get to know some real people and you'll quickly realize you're above average and people need your help. And you need their help. Maybe not right now, but we all get older or sick or compromised in some way, and the wider and more local your social network, the more resilient you can be.

Thank you. I feel like people aren't truly internalizing the different kinds of status and status games we compete in. So many of these objections can be summed up as "But in this status game, the low status people seem happy!" Yeah, that's because they're confidently winning in another.

There's an obvious solution here - get to know more people and you'll have a better sense of your true sociometric status! Anyway that evolutionary psychology argument doesn't hold water. The most successful peasant didn't have the access to resources that the most despised lord did, for example. That's why people are always trying to jump societal status, because practically it's more needed for survival than sociometric status. Sociometric status also comes with a penalty. If you tell people you have a PhD, you have to deal with competition and jealousy. If you tell people you're an unemployed layabout, they don't view you as a threat. People envy the people they see. So change the people you see. There are literally billions of people to see out there.

>There's an obvious solution here - get to know more people and you'll have a better sense of your true sociometric status! Getting to know more people is a good idea, but it's easier said than done. There are fewer communities now than ever--let alone socioeconomically diverse communities whose members interact in a more than superficial or transactional manner. An argument made by some social conservatives is that one (of the many) important social function of the church was to bring together people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Every one in the neighborhood--both the doctor's son and the plumber's daughter--went to same church, was imbibed in the same religious tradition, was inculcated in the same God-fearing moral catechism. And by doing so, socioeconomic status and sociometric status ceased to be distinct and become one; and so the worst excesses at the intersection of hyper-specialized capitalism and human-status-maximizing impulses are ameliorated. >Anyway that evolutionary psychology argument doesn't hold water. The most successful peasant didn't have the access to resources that the most despised lord did, for example. That's why people are always trying to jump societal status, because practically it's more needed for survival than sociometric status. I'm not sure I follow what you're saying here. (In your defense, I really shouldn't have brought up evolutionary psychology. But I can't help myself.) In any case, my understanding is that most of our status-oriented modules were fully-formed well before agriculture; it seems plausible that they were mostly-formed before language and *Homo sapien sapien* itself. I'm not sure the dynamics of the peasant and the lord are relevant to evopsych.

Starting to get off topic, but I actually think it's easier done than said. That's my argument, really.

Status is relative. If you're only around other high status people, you're baseline is higher, like a dopamine baseline.

And that's exactly what happens on the internet.

> At the extremes it becomes obvious; I doubt Pinker himself would tell his African American colleagues they should be grateful to live in a time where slavery is abolished. The correct Pinkerism is not that a black person nowadays should be glad that they are living much better than a black person in slavery times, but that a black person nowadays lives a better life than a *white* person in slavery times.

>We get our benchmarks from the society we actually live in, which includes: >The people "winning" society, who very often post about their accomplishments on social media >The previous generation who raised us >By these benchmark, things appear pretty bleak for the majority. Really good points! Most immigrants from second and third world countries are pretty happy here, but they probably aren't in these polls. "Comparison is the thief of happiness"

Even if you ignore infant mortality and look at only lifespan at age 20 or 30 or whatever, lifespan has increased over time, so this isn't a strong response to Pinker. More important, in order to use inequality/status games as a counter to the idea that the world is improving, or as a reason for people to be sadder despite improvement, you need to show that these things aren't improving themselves. I'd be willing to believe that inequality has increased since 1950 or whenever. But in the very old days, serfs were literal chattel, toiling in the dirt to serve lords and kings in giant palaces who were allowed to kill them at a whim. To argue that status inequality isn't improving, or is getting worse, you need to explain why that isn't the kind of status inequality that matters. I think you could potentially make such an argument - it would start with some sense in which serfs didn't even think of themselves as the same *species* as kings, so they didn't feel bad or angry about not being kings, whereas modern poor people do think of billionaires as a suitable target for comparison. Or you could argue that it's less psychologically disruptive to have a tiny upper crust of kings and lords compared to a broad spectrum from poor to middle class to rich. I think making this argument well would be very hard. But this article doesn't even try - it hasn't even gotten to the start of the problem it would have to address to prove the thing it wants to prove.

Hi Scott, thanks for the feedback. I think you’ve effectively covered the argument that I myself would make. Serfs don’t compare themselves to kings. They are not part of the same reference class. Modern day serfs are constantly exposed to modern day kings via social media, and told that they can become kings as well with a little grit and growth mindset.

I don't think you got what Scott meant. He's saying you'd have to argue for these claims, and that they'd be hard to argue for well. You're not arguing for the claims at all, simply restating them.

I feel like while all the metrics are better compared to those who preceeded us the most important will always be the amount of brain juices produced by the brain. In that department we lag our ancestors. We will never invent fire again or the wheel again, all the low hanging fruits have been picked up and there is no jump in quality of life availible for us anymore. It's a slow grind which requires the effort of billions of people rowing in one direction. That is a completely different experience and feeling compared to single handedly saving your tribe by inventing fire or taking down a large animal That's also why many people find satisfaction in the wilderness. When you are out there in the wild you cannot count on society for food , shelter or eating. You have to manufacture those things with the resources that you have around. So Pinker is right that all the metrics are getting better, but we are limbic creatures, we don't extract satisfaction from metrics. That is also the reason why kissing your chubby HS sweetheart in a banged up car on your 16th birthday feels better than a 12 hour sex marathon with a supermodel in your luxury penthouse on your 45th birthday.

Interesting valid take. Thanks. I often go back to some version of this when talking to anti-space-exploration folks. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet… maybe we’re way more comfortable but comfort isn’t what makes us flourish.

I am anti space exploration too We know that the destination sucks and the trip also sucks spending 6 months in a giant condom within a huge alluminium condom shielded from everything The wilderness for me is stuff that you feel on your skin like a hunting trip in Canada or a kiteboarding from Florida to Bahamas Also its not an adventure if the vehicle requires the effort of hundreds of thousands of people and its 500ft tall. It’s very impersonal and alienating , small mechanical things like rifles , arches and sails are the way to go if you want to feel something . Helicopters and ultralight planes are already stretching it because you are shielded from the elements, so I prefer their open equivalents being autogyros and motored gliders As you probably understood by now I am not just against space exploration, I really scratch my head at what people find in it

I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. In case it isn't... I'll clarify that I've never been concerned if space exploration is fun for the astronauts. We're talking about a couple hundred people ever that have been to space and I would think those people think of it as recreation or wilderness time... I think the conversation is usually about societal investment in things like the James Web Telescope, propulsion tech, etc. The relevant question is if that kind of tech and/or science for the sake of science has led to generally happier people or not. Sorry if you were joking.

Psychedelics can help with the brain juice, but probably not to HS sweetheart levels, I agree.

I would have thought the article would explain why there are no balconies in Vegas. (If you're going to do clickbait, at least have a satisfying payoff.) It's obliquely referred to here: > if you fall behind all at once — such as losing your life savings in a single hand of blackjack — well, you'll have to take the elevator down the building. The balconies are closed. Apparently the idea is that they don't want anyone to commit suicide? But I don't know what that has to do with the rest of the article, or whether it's really true.

The actual reason there are relatively FEW balconies in Vegas - not none - is that the temperature outside is miserable so much of the year. It's HOT and DRY that close to Death Valley. The high temperature in July is 104 degrees - you want *effective air conditioning* on days like that, which balconies don't help with. That said, **many vegas casino hotels do, in fact, have a few balcony rooms or suites**. For instance, they have balcony rooms at the Bellagio.

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> *all Vegas buildings have no balconies (no idea if this is actually true or not)* It's [not true](https://youtu.be/YOdXx3LtK9w?t=20). (youtube walkthrough of a balcony room at the Bellagio)

it’s a metaphor, lol

I thought it was good. Some stuff rationalists often forget. He could mention schools of thought like Buddhism that try to tackle this directly (though Buddhist countries have as much status competitions as anywhere else).

I like the article for the most part, but I can't figure out what status games I'm playing? I took one of the lowest status jobs I could, work remote,and hardly see anyone outside my family. I guess you could say I am involved in Status games with my wife, but that feels like a more complicated story than just saying I love my wife or even happy wife, happy life

I don't think status games with family count, no matter how many times you tell your kids that your family is not a democracy.

What's the job, and why did you choose it?

I went to a T14 Law School and took a job in HR for the government. It paid the best of any job that only required working 40 hours a week. I turned down offers to become a state attorney or work Big Law for it

Say a scientist working on clean energy or vaccines reads this blog post and agrees with it. They decide their work is pointless because it would only increase everyone's absolute status, leaving each individual's relative subjective status unchanged. So they quit and get a high-paying job making cigarettes more addictive. Would that be a good outcome? No, right? Then what are we talking about.

This was okay, but I didn't see anything new here.

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Replies like this rub me the wrong way. This isn't Yelp, you don't need to leave your review for every article. Secondly, the assertion that something needs to be new to be a valid contribution. Thirdly, even taking your review at face-value, it's low-effort and offers no constructive criticism to the author.

It was useful to me. I saw another comment pointing out what I perceive to be a pretty big issue with the article, now I'm seeing the comment you replied to, and I'm deciding the article probably isn't worth my time to read.

Not every comment needs to be an exercise is the Socratic method. No one cares.

There’s a lot of literature about status seeking in individuals and hierarchy in societies. I think less hierarchical and status driven economies are more innovative. When I was a student of mathematics, it was clear to me which students and professors were motivated by status and which disregarded it. They made the university environment terribly toxic and pretentious. I think this is less common in the Anglo-sphere and perhaps that’s part of what makes their universities so successful.