Contra Aella on Status

I’ve visited Berkeley a few times, and whenever I’m with the rationalists, it feels like there will inevitably be at least one conversation about status. I never knew or cared what they actually meant with this word, so would politely wait until the conversation had moved on to something else. One of the rationalist virtues is interrogation of the uninterrogated, and one of the other virtues is transgression, so I figured that this was part of that, and could safely be ignored.

Someone came up to me at LessOnline, and said that they liked my books, then said, “It’s weird to be talking to you, because you’re high status and I’m low status.”

I replied something to the effect of, “I’m just a guy”, but found the comment to be about a hundred times weirder than the idea that they had read my books and I had no context for who they were.

And then I still did no reading on status for another year, until I was finally sitting down at a fireside having an extended conversation where I confessed my ignorance and various rationalists attempted to explain the concept to me. I wouldn’t say that this was particularly illuminating; I kept failing to understand the core concept. I was given some homework in the form of a book (Impro) and some blog posts (Aella’s) and decided that I would cure my ignorance and confusion.

It turns out that I just think the rationalists are wrong.

In Impro, Keith Johnstone says this:

Status is something that’s confusing unless it’s defined as something one does.

In The Building Blocks of Status, Aella says this:

My favorite way to conceive of status is having what other people want.

I note my confusion.

And it might be one thing if Johnstone was using “status” in one way, dominance and submission, a study of body language, while Aella was using “status” in another way, all about actual material reality. But alas, it’s not so simple! Here’s Johnstone just a moment later:

Status seems to me to be a useful term, providing the difference between the status you are and the status you play is understood.

Sorry, but you just said that status is something defined as “something one does”. If it’s something one does and something one is, then you should be using different words. But it’s at least clear why he’s muddling things:

I should really talk about dominance and submission, but I’d create a resistance. Students who will agree readily to raising or lowering their status may object if asked to ‘dominate’ or ‘submit’.

He then also muddles this repeatedly throughout the chapter on status, as when he says that a king surrounds himself with dwarves and cripples to raise his status. This … does not fit in well with the earlier framework.

Aella’s mixing of terms seems downstream of having read Johnstone (and probably other authors I haven’t read). There’s not much of playing status or status maneuvering in the currently existing status series, but she does have a bit of it in Sex as a Status Game, and seems to be promising more in a single line of Power Hierarchies.

While I think much of identity is figuring out ways to socially position yourself into value, I want to be clear that a great deal of status maneuvering is making sure you are low status. I’ll talk about this - and what determines people’s choices to make high vs low plays - later.

So status means two things, and in an ideal world, we wouldn’t confuse them:

1. “Status” is a matter of dominance and submission, emotions and body language

2. “Status” is a matter of material facts about the world

Here’s my attempted synthesis:

Status-as-value (Aella) and status-as-dominance (Johnstone) connect through expectations. Material markers—credentials, wealth, expertise, physical appearance—create expectations about who will dominate in an interaction. These expectations then shape the actual dominance dynamics: if I expect you to dominate, I’m less likely to challenge you, more likely to defer, more likely to “play low” in Johnstone’s terminology. Beyond the material markers are a bunch of immaterial markers, like when you tell me about that time you met Taylor Swift backstage, and these feed into expectations as well, which feed into dominance.

The thing that I strongly disagree on is whether this explains all that much about human behavior.

My confusion about status turned to disagreement around this paragraph of Aella’s Power Hierarchies:

But often the way people in small suburban worlds have status competitions is by trying to pull other people into the hierarchies they do better at. Your friend suggests you all watch a movie that’s from a genre they know a lot about, thus getting everyone to invest microscopically in a hierarchy they’re confident in. People share fun facts from their field of expertise, implicitly setting up a frame that these facts are worth caring about and the expert is the source of this value. You don’t do well in STEM, so you downplay how important STEM is and talk at length about how important literature is to the world. A huge amount of socializing is fighting in tiny micro wars over which hierarchies people should care about, and they are, almost without fail, hierarchies the speakers rank higher in than the listeners.

This is not my experience of small suburban worlds, where I grew up and still spend most of my time. It’s not my experience of having conversations with people. I don’t think it’s how other people observe the world. I don’t think it’s a good explanation for what status is and what status-seeking looks like. I don’t think that we go through these elaborate subconscious micro-calculations.

I have a friend who is a fan of horror movies, and she’ll invite me to them every now and then. I think the best, most salient explanation for this is that she likes me, and likes horror movies, and finds it more enjoyable to watch a movie with someone she likes so she can engage in the rituals of pre-show and post-show discussions. I think it’s true that horror movies are an area of competence for her, and that if we were to conceive of us being in a “horror movie hierarchy” then she would absolutely win … but I don’t think this is a sensible thing to do. I don’t think it’s what’s going on.

It seems to me that when Aella talks about status, she’s telling stories about what’s happening in people’s brains, and so here I’ll tell a story of my own, one which I think better explains the world: people seek mastery for its own sake and stay within their areas of competence, and they do this for non-status evolutionary reasons.

Imagine a caveman, Grug, that has to decide between whether to fish or pick fruit. He tries the fishing thing and after three hours, has nothing to show for it but wrinkled skin from standing in the river. This naturally discourages him more attempts at fishing, because he’s not getting a reward for his efforts. Then he goes off to pick fruit, and finds a nice ripe mango right off the bat. It’s just mango after mango for this guy! He’s feasting on mangos, juice dripping down his chin. He’s going to live to see another day.

Is this about status? I would submit that mostly it’s not. I think the human brain is set up to follow reward signals because these rewards help us to stay alive, rather than because we’re secretly competing in hierarchies and attempting to prove mastery over others. I think we are reward-seeking creatures, with some built in mechanisms of dissatisfaction and decay. I think frustration is one of the primary drivers of action.

Aella says:

Our formative years is a process of figuring out what hierarchies are around us, learning which ones we find delight in, and then trying out the ones we might succeed at.

This seems like the wrong explanation to me. Here’s mine:

In our formative years, we go through the process of finding out what makes us happy. Generally, this means finding an area of competence, but it must be something that isn’t too difficult (excess of frustration) and isn’t too easy (lack of stimulation).

Now, I think it’s obvious that social dynamics can play a role here, because there are social reward signals and social punishment signals. I don’t want to deny that if everyone cheers for you when you break the high school track record, that feels pretty great above and beyond your own intrinsic pride and accomplishment at doing something tough. Conversely, if you write a short story you’re proud of and your father says that it’s juvenile trash, that feels incredibly bad.

But … is “status” the right explanation for that either?

Caveman Grug brings an armful of mangos back to his family. They share in the treat together, and Grug’s family is happy, because now they’re not going to starve. I’m very wary of telling evolutionary just-so stories, but my guess is that in social animals, praise is usually a form of reward signal boosting, something that requires both a praise mechanism and sensitivity to the praise of others. I think there’s a frame in which Grug is engaging in high status behavior, and I think this is overcomplicating things by a lot.

After the feast, there are still mangos left over, and Grug’s small son, Grun, takes one of the mangos and throws it off a nearby cliff. He delights in seeing the ripe fruit sailing through the air and landing in the sea, then turns back just in time to see his father getting ready to beat him for wasting fruit. Evolutionarily obvious, right? Grun has done something to endanger his family, and any joy he had from the gleeful wasting of food needs to be punished. And there’s some frame where Grun is engaging in “low status behavior”, but it’s simpler than that, right?

Aella has this to say in Why Status is Confusing:

We’re built out of so many things — love for families, enjoyment of art, satisfaction from hard work; religion isn’t just a system but often a genuine experience of belief in God. All of these things intertwine fluidly with our status incentives, and extracting the pure status out for study can be as challenging as extracting the yellow back out of orange paint.

And then says things like this:

You yourself are likewise imbued with some glow of desire, and much of your social brain is dedicated to monitoring how much.

or:

For most people, most thoughts about yourself are subtle, subconscious nudges figuring out narratives that reinforce your desired position in all your hierarchies.

or:

Your choices of food, of clothing, of books to read - all of them are influenced by status competitions.

or:

How many of my preferences are genuinely mine, as opposed to some elaborate psychological strategy to feel socially safe? Even when I like things that are ‘low status’ I feel cool for seeming ‘immune to status’, which… is high status. So who am I? Is my entire identity just strategy all the way down? (Mostly, but not entirely...)

When I read lines like this, I think “whoa, hey now, I know we’re using a lens here, I know we put up a disclaimer, but let’s take a step back and admit that not every can of paint actually has yellow in it”.

Johnstone, for his part, has a few similar lines:

I’ve known about this ever since I was given a book about social dominance in kittiwake colonies, yet I hadn’t immediately thought of applying this information to actor training. This is because normal people are inhibited from seeing that no action, sound, or movement is innocent of purpose.

or:

If status can’t ever be got rid of, then what happens between friends? Many people will maintain that we don’t play status transactions with our friends, and yet every movement, every inflection of the voice implies a status.

It’s me, I’m one of those many people.

I think totalizing frameworks are attractive, and when you’re viewing things through a lens, it’s very tempting to say “yes, I understand everything now”, or to make broad, sweeping claims about how applicable this all is. Part of the fun of using a lens is that someone says, “well, explain this then” and the game is one of constrained interpretation. I find lenses and constrained interpretation to be fun, and this was a major part of my English degree1. You can do a gender reading, a class reading, a sex reading, a post-colonial reading, a communist reading … sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s important to know when you’re applying the wrong lens to a situation, one that’s just leading you to stretch further and further away from the truth.

Aella opens the status series with this disclaimer:

I am not claiming status is the one truth to rule them all, and much of what I will discuss can be described equally as well by other frameworks. I’m not claiming there’s no poetry in human interaction, or that our interactions are just status. Rather, I’m going to try to present a series of rules as a toolbox for helping predict human behavior. For a time, let’s put on our Status Glasses and investigate what we see.

And so maybe she would say that she completely agrees with me, that this is all a lens, that some of the harder claims are claims made through the lens of status rather than “actually true” or whatever we might want to say. My feeling is that this sort of disclaimer lets you have it both ways, blunting any criticism by allowing a place of retreat. The more I take the disclaimer seriously, the less I have to take the claims in any of the articles on status as true. And in speaking to the rationalists generally, people who have bought into this way of thinking, the defensive disclaimer isn’t present.

I think there’s a cleaving difference between me and the rationalists I’ve spoken to about status, and for me, it’s how seriously we take the idea that status actually explains anything.

Which is not to say that it’s useless. Status-as-value and status-as-dominance both have some explanatory power. And there are people for whom status is the only thing happening in their head.

I met a guy who was obsessed with status and hated him instantly.

He began by talking about his subscriber counts, then shifted into listing his accolades, and he sucked all the oxygen out of the room, doing his best to sharply control the conversation. He would ask people what they did, with rapid follow-up questions, and when he’d ascertained that they had nothing to offer him, he would move on to the next person. He was quick to bring any conversation back around to himself, and every anecdote he had in his inventory was one that made him look good, or made someone else look bad. It was not subtle.

I haven’t been to many networking events, and have heard that as a mode, this is fairly common. The feeling of someone’s eyes going dead when they make a calculation that you won’t help them meet their goals is one that many people are familiar with.

So I think that this is a mode that some people have, and can induce in themselves, and maybe I just caught that one guy on a bad day, except then I met him a second time at a dinner party and he was even worse. I don’t have strong theories on how and why the status obsessed come to be, but maybe it comes about by virtue of having extreme goal-orientation and incentives to brute-force connections. There’s a dark art, is what I’m saying. Probably there are a lot of politicians like this, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a politician.

I think if you’re one of these people, it might be easy to see everyone else like this. And even if you’re not like this, you might think that this is the main thing driving other people, particularly if you find yourself in a culture where status-awareness and status-seeking is the norm. If any conversation is a fight to have value in the eyes of those around you, then maybe you do orient yourself in that direction: this is you responding to social reward signals.

My sense is that this is a pretty miserable and uninteresting way to live. But I think I know what someone who frames things in terms of status would say.

One of the things that you do when you say “it’s all about the hidden motive of status” is to make claims about the world. When someone pushes back and says, “I don’t think that’s right”, you have a couple of rhetorical tricks available to you.

First, you can claim that this person is some kind of aberration, unable to see what’s clear to everyone else. They’re status blind, status immune, or possibly autistic.2 I’ve had this happen to me a few times, and I wouldn’t say that it feels good. Saying “no” to the concept feels like I’m doing an anti-social thing and breaking up the game-play of status conception.

Second, you can claim that this person is engaging in status. Paying attention to status is low status, so by saying that you don’t pay attention to status, you’re playing high status. And playing high status? You better believe that’s low status.3

If someone protests that they’re not doing any kind of status play, that they’re engaged in conversation and socialization for the purposes of e.g. having fun, exchanging information, trying to have sex with a girl, etc., then you of course can claim that these are all status, and that status is subconscious, so if we somehow took their brain apart, we’d be able to see where the status chunk is located and see it lighting up like crazy when you were sharing your story about that time you harvested rice in Korea.

I find this all slightly irritating. It doesn’t feel like there’s an out to the status conversations, at least as far as I’ve observed them while in the Bay Area. Admittedly, during some of these conversations I was just confused about the way that people were using words, but it’s the frame that I think is unsuitable, and I just want off of the ride. “This too is a status move” is the framework’s last line of defense, and also its weakest.

One of the reasons that “status blindness” comes around as a concept, I think, is that some of what “status” means to people is phenomenological. It’s a feeling they’re getting at, a live current in the air they can touch, it’s just “there”. Can’t you feel it when a billionaire walks into a room? Don’t you feel the pull of the guy who competed in the Olympics? Doesn’t it radiate off celebrities? In this framework, we’ve made a subtle shift from status-as-value and status-as-dominance into status-as-emotion, and I do think it’s important to poke at that a little bit.

To start, I think some of what we’re talking about are attention mechanisms in the brain. If I’m at a party with all my regular pals, and someone new shows up, sure, whatever, probably just the usual friend-of-a-friend. But if I hear they’ve done something interesting? That’s getting my attention. And I think, when I try to examine that phenomenology, that it really is more about having a potential for stimulation, rather than status feelings. Compare the following:

• “That’s Chris, he’s a billionaire.”

• “That’s Charles, he’s a speedrunner.”

Which of these people would you feel more drawn to talk to? For me, it’s the speedrunner, no doubt. I would have all kinds of questions. What game do you speedrun? How’d you get into it? What’s it like behind the scenes? And honestly, there’s a bit of anticipation there for me: the speedrunner probably wants to talk about speedrunning. They’ll probably be engaged. The billionaire probably doesn’t want to talk about being a billionaire, and if they did, it would be worse.

I once found myself standing in a group with three guys who were talking about bond yields. I don’t remember what it was we’d all been talking about before bond yields, but that was where the conversation landed. I have nothing to say about bond yields. I wasn’t interested in anything that they had to say. I was bored out of my mind. I was under-stimulated and feeling like I had other things that were better to do. I stayed there for a bit, because it’s rude to immediately dip out when the conversation momentarily moves to a topic you think is awful, and they seemed to be having fun, but I wasn’t.

There’s a status explanation here of hierarchies: knowledge of bond yields (and finance generally) is not a hierarchy that I can compete in, and my natural desire is to move the conversation to a hierarchy where I do better. But the phenomenological experience was under-stimulation, a feeling of wanting to change the channel. And this particular feeling, boredom, seems strongly evolutionarily motivated! It seems like a thing you’d really want to have there so that animals don’t get stuck in pointless loops of behavior.

I was asked “haven’t you ever been in a group conversation, and one of the people leaves, and you all kind of realize that this person was the only reason you were there?” and the answer was “yes, of course”. But my explanation is that this person was interesting to talk to. Not interesting in a hierarchy way, interesting in that they had things to say about subjects I was interested in! Or someone who was funny! Or a girl that I was attracted to! There’s a frame where you can say that this is hierarchy, but the phenomenology doesn’t feel like that to me, and the evolutionary explanations seem like they often have much simpler explanations than status.

I’ve noticed that getting attention from other people feels nice … but not always. There’s a way that interactions can go south when it feels like the thing I’m doing is entertaining someone, when I’m giving and they’re not giving back, or when they try to give back and I’m simply not that interested in them.4 Shouldn’t this feel nice, in terms of status? Shouldn’t it feel good that someone has maybe even sought me out for my unique insights, that they’re hanging on my words, that they’re enjoying my company? And it’s not that these are low status people I’m talking with, it’s that I, too, need stimulation. Surely we can conceive of speaking with a Hollywood A-list actor and realizing that they’re a vapid moron, right?

Or let’s take one of the classic status examples: you’re at a party, you’re having a good time, you’re maybe even dominating it, telling jokes that people are laughing at, telling anecdotes that people are into, getting a bunch of attention from other people. Then someone else walks into the room who is, in basically all ways, your better. They’re in your field, they have more accolades than you, etc. That’s deflating, especially when they people who were talking to you are now talking to them.

To me, this is about social function, not status itself. I suppose that the argument is that it’s social function and status, but if I have one explanation in hand, I need a lot of convincing to add in a second, less powerful explanation.

I was waiting for a Lyft outside a restaurant with some friends, and across the street, some kids were playing soccer. One of them kicked the ball a little too hard, and it rolled across the street, getting wedged under the front bumper of a Porsche. I trotted over, unstuck the ball, and pitched it across the street, to a “thank you” and a wave from the children, before returning to where my friends were still waiting.5 I’ll report that I didn’t have much conscious thoughts about what I was doing, aside from worrying that one of the children would run out into the road.

Now, I think we have two competing explanations for what happened here, two broad tools that we can use.

Was I signaling conscientiousness to my friends? Was I demonstrating my value to raise my status? Was I trying to raise my status in the eyes of the children? Was I signaling low status by doing something that no one asked me to do, demonstrating a natural subservience?

Or was I doing something to help someone because I could, because I was there, because being nice feels good? Was my subconscious motivation kindness? Did this come from the ancestral prosocial instinct?

These explanations are in competition with each other, but I think they can co-exist, at least to some extent, and I think of the two of them, empathy, prosocial instincts, reward mechanisms, and mastery-seeking offer a lot more explanatory power and don’t really benefit from weaving in status games.

Maybe you can keep the concept of status, a little bit, and think about status in those circumstances where it feels most apt. But whenever there’s a temptation to use it to explain everything, a key to unlock the mysteries of human social interactions, I think you should be wary.

I ran this essay by a friend before posting, and he said, “You’re not going to like this, but a post like this is a bit of a status play.” He was right, I didn’t like that.