/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

The idea that there's a single consensus ordinal ranking of social status across even a small city, much less an entire society doesn't ring true to me.

>>7219

Stop giving a shit about other people you fucking normie.

>>7220

How does that changes anything though? You can see it as a whole thing or as many small things interacting together, it's the same. Zero-sum competition remains and gets worse the easier life gets.

>>7221

We live in a normie world. The question was meant for leftists so gtfo.

>>7222

How does it get worse? And what's the big deal with it existing?

TBH this concern sounds Hansonian.

>>7219

>it is a 0 sum game

[citation needed]

>that would only get worse in a post scarcity, casteless, raceless, etc. "Utopic" society?

[citation really fucking needed]

>>7224

>[citation needed]

Seriously? Social status is basically how cool you are, which makes no sense besides how cool you are compared to others. If you become more cool, everyone else you compete with becomes less cool because that's what cool means, it cannot be separated from other people's evaluations. Unless you suggest personal simulations for everyone and no contact, it will always be 0 sum.

>[citation really fucking needed]

When people have shit to do, by which I mean they die if they don't, they don't have much time or resources to engage in status competition, especially not the variety that is entirely decoupled from good things. Of course it's not the only thing they would do, but it would definitely get worse.

Unless by utopic you are considering a change in human nature?

I just want to know if leftists have approached the issue, do some at least consider it real?

What would be more likely if you made today world's post-scarcity? Peace, enlightened autism and social status distributing itself magically either equally or as an incentive for the most noble people? Or a degenerate monkey mess, infighting and outfashioning each other in increasingly moronic ways?

>> enlightened autism

oxymoron

>>7225

>If you become more cool, everyone else you compete with becomes less cool because that's what cool means

I don't think this notion of what 'cool' means is necessarily particularly attached to reality. You're imagining coolness as a straight ranking of individuals within a group, and deriving its properties from manipulation of that imagined idea. But that's not really how social shit works. People can be well-respected within one group and totally unwelcome in another. This could be the case if there were an objective ranking of everyone, but I don't think that's so - literature professors don't have high social rank among body-builders, and the same is true the other way around, so clearly neither group 'strictly dominates' the other as would be expected if there were a single global 'coolness rank.' In reality, status is a measure of respect, appreciation, a certain amount of envy, and various other things. I don't see any particular reason that people can't just gain status within a particular group.

>When people have shit to do, by which I mean they die if they don't, they don't have much time or resources to engage in status competition, especially not the variety that is entirely decoupled from good things.

Most jobs involve some amount of status-jockeying, some more than others. Some, quite a lot of it. So I'm not really sure where you're getting this idea from.

>I just want to know if leftists have approached the issue, do some at least consider it real?

Let me, a leftist, be blunt. If our transcendent descendants have nothing worse to worry about than whether they're considered cool or not, that's excellent. Like, a really amazing improvement over the status quo. Bigger than can be imagined.

My actual expectation is a increasing fracturing into sub-groups and other small communities. The vast majority of people will fit in at least somewhere. And if someone's really so autistic that literally no other group can accord them any respect, well, maybe solipsistic simulationism actually is the best option for them.

I think you're colouring your expectations with your personal aesthetic that all social status competition is "moronic," probably because it was a game that everyone else at school played but that you didn't see the point of and didn't know the rules for. Welcome to the club.

>>7228

>But that's not really how social shit works. People can be well-respected within one group and totally unwelcome in another.

Yes. They still have to compete within each group, though, unless they are of the "enlightened" variety, and even then plenty of groups turn to shit after it gets out of control. Most groups are also not self contained, nor should they imho. The so called sexual "marketplace" is pretty relevant, though I believe this is a hard idea for lefties to even entertain. Do you think status is not 0 sum or do you think it's 0 sum nature can be managed without issues / is not harmful in the first place? I can't imagine a single way in which someone could gain status without diminishing someone else's.

>So I'm not really sure where you're getting this idea from.

Personal experience TBH. The rich, lazy and idle usually engage in ridiculous signaling and status wars. Every group has its own bullshit and there's intergroup fighting too, of course. The "degenerate elite with nothing else to do besides trying to "out-alpha" each other (Nerds have their "alphas" too) is not exactly a new idea.

>If our transcendent descendants have nothing worse to worry about than whether they're considered cool or not, that's excellent. Like, a really amazing improvement over the status quo. Bigger than can be imagined.

Deeply misguided, degenerating, suicidal even. Royal turkeys are bad enough and they had real things to worry about too.

>think you're colouring your expectations with your personal aesthetic that all social status competition is "moronic," probably because it was a game that everyone else at school played but that you didn't see the point of and didn't know the rules for. Welcome to the club.

This is pretty uncharitable. It might appear aesthetically based, it is but only up to a certain point. Any bullshit status competition that gets out of control is bad, even if we're talking about an alien species I could barely understand. If the status decouples from real, good things (Whatever those are for this species) then shit gets ugly.

>>7229

>I can't imagine a single way in which someone could gain status without diminishing someone else's.

Have you actually tried? Or did you stop when nothing immediately presented itself? Here's three:

-New tennis club player wins their first game. The person they beat isn't a petulant child, and congratulates them along with everyone else. Everyone's a winner!

-Shy person learns to speak out and be part of conversation. Who even loses here? Everyone gets to talk to one more person. Unless you think losing those precious, precious seconds you could have spent propounding your views instead is a cruel blow to your status.

-Teammate steps up to captain a leaderless group, leading them to multiple victories in whatever who cares. Everyone else is glad that the new leader is finally playing for real. The only person who'd feel they lost status here would be the wannabe leader who envies the new captain, but no one's obliging anyone to be that person.

What evidence is there that a simple, zero-sum status hierarchy exists in most human groups? And no, the behaviour of chickens doesn't count.

Counter-evidence:

-None of the groups of humans I've known have had such a hierarchy

-It's trivial to imagine people gaining status without others losing any if you're not blinded by your preconceptions

-On an ab-initio basis, status is a matter of feelings and other subjective states. There's no conservation laws in action and no differentiable symmetries that would give rise to them. Or, to put it another way, it's just not got a large enough prior.

And yes, I'm being uncharitable. Ban me.

>>7230

>Everyone's a winner!

This is what betas ACTUALLY believe.

>>7231

I'll be sure to note that next time someone talks about "making the pie bigger" wrt economics.

>>7232

Idiot. Status is not money.

Growth makes everyone better off because increased productivity means there's more stuff around and people can afford to buy it.

The amount of mates is more or less fixed, and someone else getting a better one means you get a worse one.

>>7233

>arguments aren't exactly the same

>therefore they're not analogous

You've moved on from talking about status to talking only about sex. Freud would be pretty smug about that, but then, he was pretty smug abot everything so whatever. But regardless, the point is that you can't just dismiss the argument on the basis that it sounds vaguely naive and optimistic, any more than a marxist can dismiss economic growth on the grounds that it sounds vaguely naive and optimistic

>>7231

Hitler dubs

/thread

>>7230

That third example, "teammate steps up to captain a leaderless group", seems very obviously an example of status gained at the expense of others, it's just that a) people aren't always worrying about their relative status in whichever circle, especially not in the conscious system 2 way that autists like us are; b) if the team won a bunch of victories, they've gained status against others, it probably compensates.

>>7234

What do you think status is for?

>>7236

My personal experience is that it doesn't *feel* like a loss of status, and if personal feelings aren't why we care about status in the first place, what else is?

>>7238

If you lose status but don't notice it, the marginal effects of being marginally lower-status will effect your personal feelings later on. Assuming status is real, at least.

Well this thread took a predictable turn. Why is it that so many people with disabilities specifically related to understanding other people somehow think that they are naturally brilliant sociologists even without any training?

>>7240

What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?

OP here.

I actually thought about preemptively explaining why the comparison to economic growth would be stupid but then I thought: No, I am in /ratanon/ and I shouldn't insult my fellow rats like that! It's too obvious.

No surprise the same cryptochad that can't argue without bullying and accusing others of being low status (Seriously, go back to school m8) brought up the comparison as an argument…

Fucking lefties. I was thinking more about things like the effects of anonimity in status competition and how it can be used in science and art to keep things honest, humilty as adaptation, etc. Guess discussing the real world with lefties is simply impossible when it comes to some issues.

>>7242

>arguing with leftists

What the fuck did you expect?

>>7242

For fuck's sake man, everyone knows that economics is not a zero-sum game. That was the whole fucking point of making the comparison, to show that "durr hurr you am think game is not zero-sum, must be optimistic moron" is a stupid argument.

You still haven't demonstrated your thesis to anything like a plausible level, and I'm despairing of ever seeing you even try to. Easier to claim you tried your best to have an open discussion but the Awful Outgroup is just too unwilling to meet you halfway-! Have fun I guess.

>>7244

>For fuck's sake man, everyone knows that economics is not a zero-sum game. That was the whole fucking point of making the comparison,

Are you seriously retarded? Christ. I know economics is not a zero-sum game, I said that it's stupid for obvious reasons to compare economics to social status when it comes to the zero-sum thing. There are some dimensions of social status that could be non zero-sum and others that definitely are.

All three examples you gave are obviously zero-sum and I'm not interested in teaching you basic common sense and degrading the level of this board even if said level is entirely in my head, the problem is more related to leftist zombyism than anything else. Good luck with that.

>>7245

That's the problem all right, leftist zombyism. Not that you've utterly failed to justify why what you are worried about is or ever will be an actual problem.

Spend more time fucking and less worrying about "the distribution of mates".

Maybe one can re-frame worries about "status competition" as worries about value drift.

That is, if we unpack what it meens to "seek status", it roughly means that you seek to make other people consider you an "excellent human", in the arete sense. Typically, that will motivate you to be excellent, which is a good thing.

However, what people consider excellence is somewhat arbitrary (c.f. The Melancholy of Subculture Society). In a scarcity society there is a unifying force that keeps these expectations in line; generally people will value you if you put food on the table. And the properties we appreciate in general (intelligent, muscular, warlike, …) can often be traced back to such utilitarian concerns.

In a post-scarcity society, food is no longer a problem, so the general opinion of what is "excellent" can drift randomly. Thus, we would expect it to diffuse away, and maybe the People of the Future will instead try to be (dumb, fat, wimpy, …). From our perspective we should consider that a tragedy, it's squandering the Gift We Give Tomorrow.

>>7247

I can't put myself in the shoes of someone that's actually worried that people in some far future will be fat and wimpy.

I have to just mentally substitute bored. As a way to pass the time, no problem. But actually worried? WTF?

>>7248

Of course the future is important, some people are willing to betray their ancestors and descendants in order to be lazy and degenerate in peace but the opposite shouldn't make you go WTF. "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."

It's not only the future, for starters. Problem is already here and has been for a while. Chinese ladies malforming their own feet is a good example, and certainly not something that would've happened if they had to gather berries and run from predators every day. It's not just about mates, it's about art, science, aesthetics, actual health, Intelligence…

For me, values have already drifted way past what I consider desirable. I understand the left rejects the concept of degeneration and says that if everyone's a fat dumb fucker hooked to VR, well, we wouldn't want to be ableist and fatphobic…

It's a recipe for degeneration and eventual extinction that's already very much on course.

>>7249

Before it hits extinction they'll be the hunger your like so much. The problem you describe, inasmuch as it is real to begin with, is a self-correcting one.

It seems like what we are looking is in the final analysis a purely aesthetic issue.

>>7249

What does it matter if the masses are degenerate? A true rightist would turn himself into a Friendly AI™ and claim his place as their natural superior and overlord in the cosmic hierarchy.

Technology is not a degenerating force. Vulgar rightists have this the wrong way round. Technology just exposes who is already degenerate in their heart and soul. Those with high time preference are destroyed by abundance because they are weak. Technology degenerates nothing. Technology in fact increases the level of challenge in staying non-degenerate, so it effectively sorts the men from the cucks boys, and technology also increases the power of the intelligent and excellent, allowing them to become Randian supermen.

>>7251

Of course, there is a good reason the vulgar rightists don't recognize this, because they fear that they might be among the degenerate conquered by technology.

Confronted with Jewish excellence, a real rightist wouldn't try to coddle his people by letting the inferior white masses swamp them, anymore than he'd let inferior black masses swamp whites. IQ is a much more sharp and deliciously unfair, unfamilial delineator of hierarchy than mere race, which only approximates it. Ethnonationalism is just rightism lite at best. To be truly rightist, whiteness must only be a stepping stone on the path to immortal cyborg-kin. Traditionalism is only right wing to the extent that it sets us back on the path to true progress.

"We must secure the existence of increasingly accelerating intelligence and a future for hyper-intelligent entities."

This is one the reasons I think Nick Land is the most right wing figure to have ever lived. Only by breaking through the "human security system" can you become a true ubermensch free of degeneracy.

>>7250

>a purely aesthetic issue

Like 90% of political issues.

>>7228

>Most jobs involve some amount of status-jockeying, some more than others. Some, quite a lot of it. So I'm not really sure where you're getting this idea from.

This is totally reasonable if most jobs are bullshit jobs.

>>7248

Yeah, I think that's pretty much the fundamental disconnect between Bitter Lefty Anon and (to a first approximation) the entire rest of the world.

>>7252

>implying ideologies are coherently deduced from foundational propositions rather than accreted from semi-arbitrary clustering in tribal fights

>>7250

That's correct, It's going to be worse than hunger though.

One way it could self correct is by everything dying, this would be fair and preferable to cancerous degeneration but I still would prefer we (Or something else that's not sentient cancer) managed to escape this rock.

>>7251

>What does it matter if the masses are degenerate?

I agree to a certain point but degenerate masses are wasted time and resources and pose a real threat (Dark ages or worse) "AI" is already here, that's the thing, and it's not good. I don't mean that it's not good for us I mean that it lacks the discipline, sanity and perhaps wisdom to act correctly. Wouldn't be the first thing that starves after eating every animal on sight, it doesn't take a strawmanish paper-clip maximizer to get that. Superintelligences are partially made of people, at least at this stage of development. I don't see a single digital ubermensch emerging somewhere and taking over the world, that's science fiction. Would be great though.

Nothing resists wireheading, certainly not the childlike disembodied superintelligences.

There's an habitable zone of sorts when it comes to "Holy Struggle", not just for organic apes, and it goes in both directions. As a rightist I support tuning it up as high as possible but never outside the habitable zone, not before we give birth to something that could live there at least. "Responsible" leftism suggests the opposite, real life leftism pushes for lowering it below the habitable zone and this is why it is indeed a problem and not something I always celebrate as more eugenic struggle long term.

>>7252

>Ethnonationalism is just rightism lite at best.

Everything from that camp is straight leftism.

>"We must secure the existence of increasingly accelerating intelligence and a future for hyper-intelligent entities."

Exactly!

>>7254

> Yeah, I think that's pretty much the fundamental disconnect between Bitter Lefty Anon and (to a first approximation) the entire rest of the world.

On the contrary. People care about themselves. They care about their kids, hypothetical or actual. If they are old enough make that grand kids too. Approximately no one cares about far distant descendants, much less the far future general state of humanity.

Why do you think climate change types are always trying to push the supposed catastrophe closer and closer to present? It's because notwithstanding whatever they say when pressed, people don't give a fuck about what happens in two hundred years.

I said this is about aesthetics, but that's not quite right. It isn't that you guys appreciate martial prowess or the like. Rather it's that you like the idea of being the type of person that appreciates those things so you pretend in the hopes that it'll stick.

I'd rather not resign myself to being largely miserable for eternity so that anon doesn't have to worry about people liking things he doesn't like, but I guess if the alternative is being killed by asteroid I'll take it.

>>7256

>It isn't that you guys appreciate martial prowess or the like. Rather it's that you like the idea of being the type of person that appreciates those things so you pretend in the hopes that it'll stick.

You claim those are two different things?

>>7258

Yes, at least with respect to normal people. Can't speak to how aspies think.

>>7240

I don't know if you've tried going outside but it turns out that humans are inherently awful at understanding each other. Typical mind fallacy everywhere. They misrepresent each other constantly in whatever way seems most politically convenient to them at the time, even when it's incredibly patently stupid.

They don't really give a shit.

The natural mechanisms for mental modelling are perilously broken and should not be depended upon, so I'd posit that anyone who realizes that their capacity to read others is broken is likely to develop an advantage over the average person, even if they have no mirror neurons at all.

They'd still be shit at it of course, though. So yeah.